Kennedys and King Test host626

Author: James DiEugenio

  • Jeffrey Sachs, To Move The World

    Jeffrey Sachs, To Move The World

    Jeffery Sachs is a professor of economics at Columbia University. He is a Ph. D. graduate of Harvard. At the age of 28, he became a tenured, full professor of economics at Harvard. Sachs spent about two decades there before switching to Columbia in 2002. He is the author of three bestselling books: The End of Poverty, Economics for a Crowded Planet, and The Price of Civilization. He is quite controversial in his third career: as an advisor to many different countries on shifting over from a collectivist to a free enterprise system. This includes the nations of Poland, Slovenia, Estonia and the USSR. He has been named, by both Time and Vanity Fair, as one of the hundred most influential people on the contemporary American scene. Today, he is very much concerned with creating what he calls sustainable environments. That is economies, which grow, benefit all citizens, are non-polluting, and use energy that is not solely hydrocarbon based. He is clearly one of the most influential economists in America. Perhaps in the world.

    Last year, he authored a book called To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace. In the Preface to his book, he writes that he based part of a series of 2007 lectures for the BBC on Kennedy’s famous 1963 American University speech. (Sachs calls it the Peace Speech) This, of course, is the speech that so influenced Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable and which he included as an appendix to the book. (Sachs includes it as one of the four speeches he appends to the end of this book.) He also adds that he met Ted Sorenson at Columbia and the two became friends. Sorenson told him that the American University speech was his favorite. The two were then going to cooperate on a book, but Sorenson passed away. So Sachs completed the work on his own.

    The result is an uneven work. Sachs is a first-rate economist. In my view, he is not a first-rate historian. For instance, in his Preface, he calls Kennedy a Cold Warrior when he entered office. As this reviewer has stated previously, this is simply not the case. In relation to Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon, Kennedy was not a Cold Warrior in 1961. Using a multiplicity of sources, this issue has been dealt with by this reviewer in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed. (See pages 17-33) When Kennedy entered office in 1961 he was already a complex and sophisticated thinker on foreign policy. And he did not see the world’s problems through the lens of anti-communism. And he criticized those who did, e.g. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. This is why JFK reversed the Eisenhower/Dulles policy in more than one place in 1961, for example, in Congo and Laos. If he had really been a Cold Warrior, he would have kept those policies in place.

    In Chapter 1, Sachs tries to briefly sketch in the problems Kennedy had in office in 1961. Therefore, he naturally discusses the Bay of Pigs invasion. And here, this reviewer has another disagreement with the author. In writing on the Bay of Pigs, he calls the operation naive, and incompetently designed and managed. The most recent scholarship and declassified records on this issue would seem to paint a different picture. As Jim Douglass wrote in his book, using an important essay from the academic journal Diplomatic History, CIA Director Allen Dulles never really expected the operation to succeed. What he was banking on was that Kennedy really was a Cold Warrior and he would send in the Navy when he saw the operation was going to fail. (Douglass, p. 14)

    Sachs also writes in Chapter 1 that Kennedy denied the Cuban exiles air support during the first day of the invasion. As the declassified record now makes clear, this is a myth. It was created by Dulles and Howard Hunt during the White House Taylor Commission hearings on the Bay of Pigs. Hunt ghostwrote an article for reporter Charles Murphy of Fortune Magazine. That article tried to switch the blame for the failure of the Bay of Pigs from the CIA to Kennedy. Hunt and Dulles therefore created this story about the canceled D-Day air strikes. The problem is that Kennedy never approved these D-Day strikes to be launched until a sufficient beachhead bad been secured on Cuba. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 46) Since no such beachhead was ever achieved, the strikes did not go forward. But, as Lyman Kirkpatrick wrote in the CIA’s Inspector General Report, these would not have made any difference anyway. Because Castro had brought too much heavy artillery, tanks and troops to the front within 10 hours. The exiles were greatly outnumbered and outgunned before the first day was over. (pgs. 40-41)

    Further, Sachs notes an exchange between Kennedy and Eisenhower on whether or not this capitulation should have happened. He quotes Eisenhower as saying that Kennedy’s attempt to keep American forces out was wrong headed because the world was going to know that the Cubans could not have launched such an amphibious assault on their own anyway. So America had to be involved. This shows a lack of understanding of Kennedy’s version of the Truman Doctrine. Kennedy differentiated between aiding and abetting forces resisting communism, and the United States actually directly involving itself in a conflict through the insertion of American combat troops. This is something Kennedy resisted for his entire term of office. On the other hand, Eisenhower committed troops into Lebanon, Johnson into the Dominican Republican and Vietnam, and Nixon into Cambodia. Therefore, Kennedy was not a classic Cold Warrior.

    But to further try and portray Kennedy as something he was not in 1961, Sachs also notes that Jupiter missiles were inserted into Turkey at that time. This is accurate. But this deployment had been agreed upon in 1959 under Eisenhower. Kennedy was only implementing a predetermined agreement. And Kennedy had actually wanted the Jupiters removed almost immediately and replaced with Polaris undersea missiles which would not be so open to a first strike. (Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 807)

    II

    In Chapter 2, Sachs shifts to the Vienna summit and the dispute over West Berlin. He notes that Kennedy had decided in advance not to give atomic weapons to Konrad Adenauer and West Germany. He traces the subsequent Berlin Crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall in August of 1961. Sachs adds that the stemming of the flow of refugees from East Berlin to West Berlin by the construction of the wall did much to lessen the tension over the refugee issue. So, in an ironic way, the construction of the wall actually helped solve a practical problem as it created a large, dark symbol of the Cold War.

    Afterwards, Kennedy told O’Donnell that he thought the whole crisis was overblown. To risk so many lives over access rights on the autobahn was simply ridiculous.

    As a result of the crisis, Russia now announced it was resuming nuclear testing. And on October 30, 1961, the Tsar Bomba test explosion took place at the Novaya Zemyla archipelago. This hydrogen bomb device had a yield of 55 megatons. To this day, it is the largest nuclear explosion ever recorded. It had ten times the power of all the bombs ever dropped during World War II. Sachs writes that, to Kennedy, this resumption of testing was the greatest disappointment in his first year in office. As a reaction, the president had Asst. Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric spell out America’s distinct advantage in nuclear weaponry. Sachs now says that this was a precipitating cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Again, this reviewer cannot recall interpretation noted elsewhere. In The Kennedy Tapes, which is probably the best volume on the subject, this is never even mentioned as a cause of the crisis.

    From here, Sachs begins to chronicle the Missile Crisis. Again, he says something questionable. He writes that Kennedy favored an air strike at the beginning of the Ex Comm meetings. In the strictest sense, this may be true. But by questioning what would happen as a result of stray bombs during an air strike, Kennedy then searched for another option. He was not willing to risk thousands of dead civilians over a superpower conflict. One in which these civilians would be innocent bystanders.

    Sachs then proceeds to the conclusion of the crisis. The exchange included the Russians removing their atomic weapons on the island for a public pledge by Kennedy not to invade Cuba, combined with a secret agreement to remove the obsolete Jupiters in Turkey.

    The author sees this conclusion to the Missile Crisis as the prelude to both Kennedy and Khrushchev now seeking a way to deter the threat of nuclear Armageddon in the future. For instance, in an exchange of letters, the Russian leader told the American president that he appreciated the restraint he had shown during the crisis.

    And this is how the author essentially sums up the first two years of Kennedy’s foreign policy forays. When I read this summary I wrote in my notes, “Sachs leaves out Congo, Indonesia, India, Ghana, all of Africa, Nasser, Sadat, Iran and several others.” And it is this lack which allows him to write that JFK was now a changed man in 1962. If, for instance, Sachs had reviewed the Congo policy, he would have seen that Kennedy was really not a changed man at the end of 1962. He entered office with revolutionary ideas about American foreign policy and the Cold War, especially in the Third World. And he enacted those ideas almost immediately. What delayed any rapprochement with the USSR was the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Which many felt impacted the Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev was determined not to lose his outpost in the Caribbean, which the Russian could use as leverage in Germany. Therefore, he misjudged Kennedy’s restraint during the Bay of Pigs and moved the nuclear triad into Cuba. If Kennedy had not been mislead about the Bay of Pigs, it is an open question that he would have gotten off to such a slow start with his rapprochement to Russia.

    III

    In Chapter 3, Sachs gets to the heart of his volume. And this is the section of the book that is the most valuable. Here the author begins to outline what he thinks were Kennedy’s goals in office concerning the Soviet Union in 1963 and how he thought they could be achieved.

    Number one on this list is arms control. After the fearsome explosion of Tsar Bomba, Kennedy was determined that the arms race be brought back under control. But Sachs notes that he was also worried about how atomic warfare could be kicked off by mistake. Kennedy was always reading. And one of his favorite books was Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. This was a microstudy of the military decisions that led up to the start of World War I. It was published in 1962 and became an immediate bestseller through most of 1963. In it, Tuchman pointed out all the miscalculations made by leaders on both sides that resulted in the tragedy of trench warfare and the astronomical casualties consumed on the Western Front. Kennedy was so impressed by the book he gave copies to his cabinet and military advisors.

    Sachs also says that by 1963 Kennedy understood that peace with the USSR was going to be a process, a series of understandings taken step by step. He also knew that it had to be achieved by recognizing what the interests of the other side were, and where there was a mutuality of interests to share and cooperate upon. Therefore, another value was that the president knew he had to be a good listener. And that he should also utilize go-betweens, which he did with Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins. Cousins served as a courier of messages between Kennedy, Krushchev and Pope John XXIII. (This extraordinary circle is captured by Cousins in his book, The Improbable Triumvirate.)

    As Sachs notes, Kennedy told Cousins that both he and Khrushchev were partly imprisoned by the militant right-wingers within their governments. And these two groups, whether they realized it or not, aided each other. Kennedy tried to assure Khrushchev, who was worried about atomic war over Germany, by not giving nuclear weapons to West Germany. And according to Sachs, this decision hurt the militant Adenauer and led to the ascension of the more reasonable Ludwig Erhard in late 1963.

    Finally, Sachs writes that Kennedy understood that only strong and vigorous leadership could work toward peace. Or as he puts it, “only active presidential leadership would overcome the doubts, fears, and provocations of the military and hardliners and the public.” Sachs then continues with, “Both Kennedy and Khrushchev gave ground to each other to enable his counterpart to force down his own domestic skeptics and critics.” (He could have added here, that Castro offered to do the same with Lyndon Johnson in order to keep up Kennedy’s attempt at détente.)

    In Chapter 4, Sachs talks about speeches that he thinks may have influenced Kennedy in his American University address. I almost fell off my chair when he mentioned Winston Churchill’s 1946 Iron Curtain speech. This was made at the invitation of President Truman in Fulton, Missouri. Sachs tries to disguise this declaration by calling it the “Sinews of Peace” speech. But clearly, when read as a whole, Churchill was calling out the Russians for their domination of Eastern Europe, even though, this had been largely been arranged in advance by the infamous Percentages Agreement between Stalin and Churchill in 1944. A call for a new Cold War is clearly how Stalin viewed the speech.

    Sachs is on a bit stronger ground when he mentions two speeches by President Eisenhower. These were both delivered in 1953. One was called the “Chance for Peace” speech and the other was the “Atoms for Peace” speech. The first was made in April of 1953 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and broadcast on TV and radio. It was made in the wake of Stalin’s death and called for a winding down of the Cold War, saying that the money spent of weapons, could help each side to build things like schools and power plants. The second speech was made before the UN at the end of 1953. In it Eisenhower called for peaceful uses for atomic energy and a non-proliferation of warheads. There has been a debate about the reasons for the speech. Some have said that Eisenhower was really just trying to soften the image of nuclear energy being only a destructive force.

    The last speech Sachs names is the famous Eisenhower Farewell Address. Most of us are familiar with this speech because Oliver Stone used it as the prelude to his film JFK. It is indeed quite a memorable speech. Yet Sachs does not make the irony as clear as he should: If Eisenhower was really serious about the first two speeches, then why did he have to make the ominous warning about the Military-Industrial Complex in the last speech?

    In point of fact, none of these speeches goes as far as Kennedy’s did in forging a new vision of understanding based on mutual interests as the America University speech. That speech, excerpted by Sachs here and Jim Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable, was probably the first by an American president to actually try and recognize the USSR as something less than a permanent opponent, as something like a necessary partner, and as such, a nation that the USA needed to understand in order to cooperate with. As Sachs says in Chapter 5, Kennedy really tried to humanize the Soviet Union and its citizenry. And as Douglass noted, the reaction to the speech in the USSR was more congratulatory than the one in the USA.

    From here, Sachs goes on to trace the push by Kennedy for the Limited Test Ban Treaty. As Thurston Clarke had noted, the president made this a very high priority. And he literally covered all the bases in advance to make sure the treaty would pass. Which it did in a resounding vote of 80-19. And about 90 other countries signed onto the treaty. But Kennedy could not get a comprehensive ban through. For the reason that he and the USSR could not agree on the number of on-site inspections per year. Evidently, the Russians thought that too many inspections would allow for American spying. Therefore, underground testing was allowed to proceed.

    But as Sachs notes, Kennedy’s technical advisers on the treaty, like Adrian Fisher, said that they felt that Kennedy saw this as just a beginning. It was just a first step in a disarmament program. Sachs also notes that after the treaty passed, Kennedy continued in his attempt at détente with the USSR. The author mentions things like cultural exchanges, the installation of the hotline for crisis management, the large sale of wheat to Russia and Kennedy’s proposal for cooperation with Russia on a project to get to the moon.

    When Kennedy was murdered, Nikita Khrushchev was overwhelmed with grief. He wrote President Johnson a moving letter saying that Kennedy’s death not just a blow to America by a loss for the whole world, including the Soviet Union. And as Sachs notes, after Kennedy’s death, Khrushchev was deposed the following year.

    Sachs closes the book with the insight that, if Kennedy lived, the nuclear arsenals would not have grown to the astronomical heights they later did. And it would not have taken as long to draw them down to a more reasonable number. He also notes that Kennedy was very interested in non-proliferation, that is that other countries not gain nuclear arsenals either. Kennedy’s vision did not come to pass in any way near the form he wanted. The USSR went on a nuclear building binge that eventually passed the size of the American arsenal. At one time, the Soviets had over 40,000 warheads. In fact, in 1974, Henry Kissinger observed, “One of the questions we have to ask …is what is the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it politically, militarily, operationally at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?”

    It was probably that comment that got Kissinger neutralized by the hawks in the Ford administration, namely Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Which was the true beginning of the neoconservative movement. Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted the USA to maintain whatever “superiority” they could. Thus began the whole Committee on the Present Danger campaign led by people like Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Paul Nitze, to drum up support for the growing mythology of Soviet military superiority. (That whole aspect, which Sachs ignores, is well described by Jerry Sanders in Peddlers of Crisis.) Therefore, it was not really until 1991 and START I that a serious step toward arms control and the lowering of numbers was actually taken. But yet, by the nineties, Kennedy’s other goal, non-proliferation, was violated since 6 other countries now had nuclear weapons. Including Israel, which Kennedy was very much opposed to.

    Causes of the Cuban Missile Crisis

    In October 1962, a U-2 American spy plane covertly took pictures of the nuclear missile sites that the Soviet Union was building on the island of Cuba. However, President Kennedy didn’t want Cuba and the Soviet Union to know that he had found the missiles. He arranged a secret meeting with his advisors for a number of days to talk about the issue. There are plenty of causes of the missile crisis in Cuba (also known as the Fidel Castro Cuban missile crisis) including America’s naval blockade, the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the arms race, the Bay of Pigs Disaster, and the Cuban Revolution.

  • On its 50th Anniversary: Why the Warren Report Today is Inoperative, In Five “Plaques”

    Introduction to the Series

    In late September and October of this year, the nation will observe the 50th anniversary of the issuance of, respectively, the Warren Report and its accompanying 26 volumes of evidence. There are certain forms of commemoration already in the works. For instance, there is a book upcoming by inveterate Warren Report apologists Mel Ayton and David Von Pein. And undoubtedly, with the MSM in complete obeisance to the Warren Report, Commission attorney Howard Willens will undoubtedly be in the spotlight again.

    At CTKA, since we report on the latest developments in the case, and are very interested in the discoveries of the Assassination Records Review Board, we have a much more realistic and frank view of the Warren Report. In the light of the discoveries made on the case today, the Warren Report is simply untenable. In just about every aspect. About the only fact it got right is that Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters. The Commission could not miss that since it was captured live on television. But, as we shall see, it got just about everything else related to that shooting wrong.

    Today, to anyone who knows the current state of the evidence in the JFK case, the Warren Report stands as a paradigm of how not to conduct either a high profile murder investigation, or any kind of posthumous fact finding inquiry. In fact, just about every attorney who has looked at the Kennedy case since 1964 in any official capacity has had nothing but unkind words about it. This includes Jim Garrison, Gary Hart and Dave Marston of the Church Committee, the first attorneys of record for the HSCA, Richard Sprague and Robert Tanenbaum, as well as the second pair, Robert Blakey and Gary Cornwell, and finally, Jeremy Gunn, the chief counsel of the ARRB. This is a crucial point-among many others– that the MSM ignored during its (disgraceful) commemoration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.

    On the other hand, CTKA’s role is one of recording fact oriented history and criticism about President Kennedy’s murder. Therefore, we wish to assemble a list of reasons why, today, the Warren Report and its verdict has the forensic impact of a pillow slap.

    In spite of that, we predict, come September, the MSM will carry virtually none of what is to follow. Even though everything you are about to read is factually supported and crucial as to why the Warren Report is so fatally flawed. The fact you will hear very little of the following, or perhaps none of it, tells you how dangerously schizoid America and the MSM is on the subject of the murder of President Kennedy. It also might give us a clue as to why the country has not been the same since.

    The following starts a continuing series which will be added to on a regular basis until late October of this year. The series will be arranged in plaques or sets. These are composed of separate, specific points which are thematically related and will be briefly summarized after all the points in a plaque are enumerated. This first set deals with the formation of the Warren Commission. And we show just how hopelessly compromised that body was from the instant it was created. We strongly urge our readers to try and get the their local MSM outlets to cover some of these very important facts that are in evidence today, but, for the most part, were not known to the public back in 1964.

    [For convenience, we have embedded the five originally separate articles into this single article.  – Webmaster]

     

    PLAQUE ONE: Hopelessly stilted at the start.

    Posted June 20, 2014

    1. Earl Warren never wanted to head the Commission and had to be blackmailed into taking the job.

    Due to the declassified records made available by the ARRB, we now know that Chief Justice Earl Warren initially declined to helm the Commission. After he did so, President Johnson summoned him to the White House. Once there, LBJ confronted him with what he said was evidence that Oswald had visited both the Cuban and Russian consulates in Mexico City. Johnson then intimated that Oswald’s previous presence there, seven weeks before the assassination, could very well indicate the communists were behind Kennedy’s murder. Therefore, this could necessitate atomic holocaust, World War III. Both Johnson and Warren later reported that this warning visibly moved the Chief Justice and he left the meeting in tears. (See James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pgs. 80-83; James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pgs. 358-59)

    2. Clearly intimidated by his meeting with Johnson, Earl Warren had no desire to run any kind of real investigation.

    Due to the declassification process of the ARRB, we now have all the executive session hearings of the Commission. Because of that, we know how effective Johnson’s chilling warning to Earl Warren was. At the first meeting of the Commission, Warren made it clear that he 1.) Did not want the Commission to employs its own investigators. 2.) They were just to evaluate materials produced by the FBI and Secret Service. 3.) He did not want to hold public hearings or use the power of subpoena. 4.) He even intimated that he did not even want to call any witnesses. He thought the Commission could rely on interviews done by other agencies. He actually said the following: “Meetings where witnesses would be brought in would retard rather than help our investigation.”

    As the reader can see, Johnson’s atomic warning had cowed the former DA of Alameda county California, Earl Warren. He had no desire to run a real investigation.

    3. Warren communicated Johnson’s warning about the threat of atomic warfare to his staff at their first meeting.

    At the Commission’s first staff meeting, attorney Melvin Eisenberg took notes of how Warren briefed the young lawyers on the task ahead, i.e. trying to find out who killed President Kennedy. Warren told them about his reluctance to take the job. He then told them that LBJ “stated that rumors of the most exaggerated kind were circulating in this country and overseas. Some rumors went as far as attributing the assassination to a faction within the Government” that wanted to install LBJ as president. These rumors, “if not quenched, could conceivably lead the country into a war which could cost 40 million lives.” (Emphasis added, Memorandum of Eisenberg 1/20/64)

    Warren then added “No one could refuse to do something which might help to prevent such a possibility. The President convinced him that this was an occasion on which actual conditions had to override general principles.” (Emphasis added) In discussing the role of the Commission, Warren asserted the “importance of quenching rumors, and precluding future speculation such as that which has surrounded the death of Lincoln.” Warren then added this, “He emphasized that the Commission had to determine the truth, whatever that might be.”

    It is those 14 words that Commission staffers, like the late David Belin, would dutifully quote for The New York Times. We now know that, by leaving out the previous 166 words, Belin was distorting the message. Any group of bright young lawyers would understand that Warren was sending down orders from the White House. The last 14 words were simply technical cover for all that had come before. When Warren said, “this was an occasion on which actual conditions had to override general principles”, he could not be more clear. In fact, that phrase is so telling that, in his discussion of the memo, Vincent Bugliosi leaves it out of his massive book Reclaiming History. (See Bugliosi, p. 367, and Reclaiming Parkland by James DiEugenio, pgs. 253-54)

    But there is further certification that the staffers got the message and acted on it. For in her first interview with the Church Committee, Sylvia Odio talked about her meeting with Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler. After taking her testimony in Dallas, he told Odio, “Well, you know if we do find out that this is a conspiracy you know that we have orders from Chief Justice Warren to cover this thing up.” (Odio’s Church Committee interview with Gaeton Fonzi, of 1/16/76)

    4. Hoover closed the case on November 24th, the day Ruby Killed Oswald.

    On that day, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called Walter Jenkins at the White House. He said that he had spoken with assistant Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach already, and that they both were anxious to have “something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 4)

    It was on this day that Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby live on television. How could Hoover have completed an investigation of that particular murder on the day it happened? To do such an inquiry, Ruby’s entire background would have to be checked, all the people he dealt with and spoke to in the preceding weeks would have to be located and spoken to, the Dallas Police force would have to be interviewed to see if he had help entering the City Hall basement, and all films, photos and audio would have to be reviewed for evidentiary purposes. This point would be crucial: if Ruby was recruited, this would indicate a conspiracy to silence Oswald. That whole investigation was done in less than a day?

    Nope. And, in fact, not only was the murder of Oswald not fully investigated at the time Hoover closed the case, but just 24 hours earlier, Hoover had told President Johnson that the case against Oswald for the JFK murder was not very good. (ibid) This all indicates that Hoover was making a political choice, not an investigatory one. It suggests everything the Bureau did from this point on would be to fulfill that (premature) decision. Which leads us to the next point.

    5. The FBI inquiry was so unsatisfactory, even the Warren Commission discounted it.

    In fact, you will not find the FBI report in the Commission’s evidentiary volumes. Even though the Commission relied on the Bureau for approximately 80% of its investigation. (Warren Report, p. xii) Why? First, Hoover never bought the Single Bullet Theory. That is, the idea that one bullet went through both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally, making seven wounds, smashing two bones, and emerging almost unscathed. The Warren Commission did end up buying into this idea, which later caused it so many problems.

    But second, the FBI report sent to the Commission was inadequate even for the Commissioners. We know this from the declassified Executive Session transcript of January 22, 1964. The Commissioners were shocked about two things. First, the FBI is not supposed to come to conclusions. They are supposed to investigate and present findings for others to form conclusions. But in this case, they said Oswald killed Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit without accomplices. That Ruby killed Oswald with no accomplices or aid. And the two didn’t know each other. In other words, this report was a fulfillment of Hoover’s message to Walter Jenkins of November 24th. (See Point 4) The Commissioners, who were lawyers, saw that the FBI had not run out anywhere near all the leads available to them. As Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin exclaimed, “But they are concluding that there can’t be a conspiracy without those being run out. Now that is not my experience with the FBI.” (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 219)

    In other words, in his zeal to close the case, Hoover broke with established FBI practice not once, but twice. In sum, the FBI report was so poor, the Commission decided it had to call witnesses and use subpoena power.

    6. Hoover knew the CIA was lying about Oswald and Mexico City. He also knew his report was a sham.

    President Johnson relied on the CIA for his information about Oswald in Mexico City. As we saw in Point 1, he used it to intimidate Warren. As we saw in Points 2 and 3, Warren then communicated this fear to the Commission and his staff.

    But what if that information was, for whatever reason, either wrong, or intentionally false? Would that not put a different interpretation on the information, its source, and Johnson’s message to Warren?

    Within seven weeks of the murder, Hoover understood that such was the case. Writing in the marginalia of a memo concerning CIA operations within the USA, he wrote about the Agency, “I can’t forget the CIA withholding the French espionage activities in the USA nor the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico, only to mention two instances of their double dealings.” (The Assassinations, p. 224, emphasis added) In a phone call to Johnson, Hoover revealed that the voice on the Mexico City tape sent to him by the Agency was not Oswald’s, “In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there.” (ibid) Needless to say, if Oswald was being impersonated in Mexico, this transforms the whole import of Johnson’s original message to Warren.

    Knowing this, Hoover went along with what he knew was a cover-up. And he admitted this in private on at least two occasions. He told a friend, after the initial FBI report was submitted, that the case was a mess, and he had just a bunch of loose ends. In the late summer of 1964, he was asked by a close acquaintance about it. Hoover replied, “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our political system would be disrupted.” (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 222)

    7. Nicolas Katzenbach cooperated with Hoover to close the case almost immediately.

    As we saw in Point 4, on November 24th, Hoover had closed the case. But he had also talked to Acting Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach that day about getting something out to convince the public Oswald was the sole killer. As we saw, Hoover did this with his makeshift FBI report.

    Katzenbach also did this with the famous Katzenbach Memorandum. (Which can be read here.) As one can see, there is evidence that Hoover actually drafted the memo for Katzenbach. It says that the public must be satisfied Oswald was the lone killer and he had no confederates still at large. It does not say Oswald was the lone killer. After all, Ruby had just killed him the day before. How could there be any conclusions reached about the matter in 24 hours? Katzenbach wants to rely on an FBI report to convince the public Knowing that the previous day Hoover had told him he was closing the case already. This memo was sent to the White House, and Katzenbach would later become the Justice Department liaison with the Commission. In fact, he attended their first meeting and encouraged them to accept the FBI report. Which they did not. (Executive Session transcript of 12/5/63)

    8. Howard Willens actually thought the CIA was honest with the Warren Commission.

    As the Commission liaison, Katzenbach appointed Justice Department lawyer Howard Willens to recruit assistant counsel to man the Commission. Willens then stayed with the Commission throughout as an administrator and Katzenbach’s eyes and ears there.

    In his journal, on March 12, 1964, Willens wrote the following: “I consider the CIA representatives to be among the more competent people in government who I have ever dealt with. They articulate, they are specialists, and they seem to have a broad view of government. This may be, of course because they do not have a special axes (sic) to grind in the Commission’s investigation.”

    Recall, former Director Allen Dulles sat on the Commission for ten months. He never revealed the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Richard Helms also was in direct communication with the Commission. He did not reveal the existence of the plots either.

    CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton was designated by Helms to be the point person with the Commission on Oswald. Tipped off by Dulles, he rehearsed with the FBI to tell the same story about Oswald’s lack of affiliation with both agencies. (Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy, pgs. 547-48) Today, of course, many informed observers believe that Oswald was an agent provocateur for the CIA and an informant for the FBI. There is ample evidence for both. (See Destiny Betrayed, Chapters 7 and 8, and John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA.) But you will not find any of it in the Warren Report.

    9. When senior lawyers started leaving, Howard Willens hired law school graduates to finish the job.

    As noted in Point 8, Howard Willens hired most of the counselors for the Commission. Surprisingly, many of these lawyers were not criminal attorneys. They had a business background or education e.g. David Belin, Melvin Eisenberg, Wesley Liebeler. But beyond that, by the summer of 1964, many of the senior counselors started to leave. Mainly because they were losing money being away from private practice. To replace them, Willens did a rather odd thing. He began to hire newly minted law school graduates. In other words, lawyers who had no experience in any kind of practice at all. In fact, one of these men, Murray Lauchlicht, had not even graduated from law school when Willens enlisted him. (Philip Shenon, A Cruel and Shocking Act, p. 404) His field of specialty was trusts and estates. When he got to the Commissions offices, Lauchlicht was assigned to complete the biography of Jack Ruby. Another recent law school graduate who had clerked for one year was Lloyd Weinreb. The 24 year old Weinreb was given the job of completing the biography of Oswald. (ibid, p. 405)

    Needless to say, these two aspects of the report, the biographies of Oswald and Ruby have come to be suspect since they leave so much pertinent material out. In fact, Burt Griffin told the House Select Committee on Assassinations, senior counsel Leon Hubert left because he did not feel he was getting any support from the Commission administrators, or the intelligence agencies, to understand who Ruby really was. (HSCA, Volume XI, pgs. 268-83) Obviously, someone who had not even graduated law school would not have those kinds of compunctions. Willens probably knew that.

    10. The two most active members of the Commission were Allen Dulles and Gerald Ford.

    As we have seen from Points 1-3, from the moment that Johnson conjured up the vision of 40 million dead through atomic warfare, Earl Warren was largely marginalized as an investigator. He was further marginalized when he tried to appoint his own Chief Counsel, Warren Olney. He was outmaneuvered by a combination of Hoover, Dulles, Gerald Ford and John McCloy. Not only did they manage to jettison Olney, they installed their own choice, J. Lee Rankin. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, pgs.41-45)

    Within this milieu, with no effective leadership, the two most active and dominant commissioners turned out to be Dulles and Ford. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, pgs. 83-85) Which is just about the worst thing that could have happened. As we have seen, Dulles was, to be kind, less than forthcoming about both Oswald, and the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. As has been revealed through declassified records, Ford was, from almost the outset, a Commission informant for the FBI. (Breach of Trust, pgs. 42-44)

    Later on, in the editing of the final report, Ford did something unconscionable, but quite revealing. In the first draft, the report said that the first wound to Kennedy hit him in the back. Which is accurate. Ford changed this to the bullet hit Kennedy in the neck. (ibid, p. 174) Which reveals that he understood that the public would have a hard time accepting the trajectory of the Single Bullet Theory. When the HSCA made public some of the autopsy photos, it was revealed the bullet did hit Kennedy in the back. Lawyers, like Vincent Bugliosi, call an act like that “consciousness of guilt”.

    11. The Warren Report only achieved a unanimous vote through treachery i.e. tricking its own members.

    One of the best kept secrets of the Commission was that all of its members were not on board with the Single Bullet Theory. In fact, as we know today, there was at least one member who was not ready to sign off on the report unless certain objections were in the record. The man who made these objections was Sen. Richard Russell. Sen. John S. Cooper and Rep. Hale Boggs quietly supported him behind the scenes. These three not only had problems with ballistics evidence, they also questioned the FBI version of just who Lee and Marina Oswald actually were. Russell was so disenchanted with the proceedings that he actually wrote a letter of resignation-which he did not send-and he commissioned his own private inquiry. (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 258)

    Realizing that Russell was going to demand certain objections be entered into the record at the final meeting, Rankin and Warren did something extraordinarily deceitful. They stage-managed a presentation that featured a female secretary there; but she was not from the official stenography company, Ward and Paul. (McKnight, p. 294) She was, in essence, an actress. Therefore, there is no actual transcript of this meeting where Russell voiced his reservations.

    This fact was kept from Russell until 1968. Then researcher Harold Weisberg discovered it. When he alerted Russell to this internal trickery, the senator became the first commissioner to openly break ranks with his cohorts and question what they had done. (ibid, pgs. 296-97) Russell was later joined by Boggs and Cooper. Hale Boggs was quite vocal about the cover-up instituted by Hoover. He said that “Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission.” (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 259)

    12. In its design and intent, the Commission was a travesty of legal procedure, judicial fairness and objectivity.

    One of the boldest lies in the Warren Report appears in the Foreword. There, the Commission declares that although it has not been a courtroom procedure, neither has it proceeded “as a prosecutor determined to prove a case.” (p. xiv) No one who has read the report and compared it with the 26 volumes believes this. For the simple reason that, as many critics pointed out, the evidence in the volumes is carefully picked to support the concept of Oswald’s guilt and Ruby acting alone. Sylvia’s Meagher’s masterful Accessories After the Fact, makes this point in almost every chapter. The Commission ignored evidence in its own volumes, or to which it had access, which contradicted its own predetermined prosecutorial conclusions.

    A good example, previously mentioned, would be what Gerald Ford did with the back wound. (See Point 10) Another would be the fact that in the entire report–although the Zapruder film is mentioned at times–there is no description of the rapid, rearward movement of Kennedy’s entire body as he is hit at Zapruder frame 313.

    Although it was helmed by a Chief Justice who had fought for the rights of the accused, the Commission reversed judicial procedure: Oswald was guilty before the first witness was called. We know this from the outline prepared by Chief Counsel Rankin. On a progress report submitted January 11, 1964, the second subhead reads, “Lee Harvey Oswald as the Assassin of President Kennedy.” The second reads, “Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives.” (Reclaiming Parkland pgs. 250-51) This was three weeks before the hearings began! Clearly, the Commission was arranged at this time as an adversary to Oswald. But there was no defense granted to the defendant. None at all.

    This is a point that the Commission again misrepresents in its Foreword. They write that they requested Walter Craig, president of the ABA, to advise whether or not they were abiding by the basic principles of American justice. And he attended hearings and was free to express himself at all times. As Meagher pointed out, this arrangement lasted only from February 27th to March 12th. And not once did Craig make an objection in Oswald’s defense. (Meagher, p. xxix) After this, Craig and his assistants did not participate directly. They only made suggestions. Further, neither Craig nor his assistants were at any of the hearings of the 395 witnesses who did not appear before the Commission, but were deposed by Warren Commission counsel.

    As more than one writer has noted, the Nazis at Nuremburg were provided more of a defense than Oswald. This fact alone makes the Warren Report a dubious enterprise.

    13. As a fact finding body, the Commission was completely unsatisfactory.

    For two reasons. First, usually, as with congressional hearings, when such a body is assembled, there is a majority and minority counsel to balance out two points of view. That did not happen here. And it was never seriously contemplated. Therefore, as we saw with Russell in Point 11, there was no check on the majority.

    Second, a fact finding commission is supposed to find all the facts, or at least a good portion of them. If they do not, then their findings are greatly reduced in validity in direct proportion to what is missing from the record.

    To cite what is missing from the Warren Report would take almost another 26 volumes of evidence. But in very important fields, like the medical evidence and autopsy procedures, like Oswald’s associations with American intelligence, as with Ruby’s ties to the Dallas Police and to organized crime, in all these areas, and many more, what the Warren Report left out is more important than what it printed. In fact, there have been entire books written about these subjects-respectively, William Law’s In the Eye of History, John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, Seth Kantor’s Who was Jack Ruby?-that completely alter the depiction of the portraits drawn of those subjects in the report. And when we get to other specific subjects, like Oswald in New Orleans, or the Clinton/Jackson incident, Mexico City, or the killing of Oswald by Ruby, the Warren Report today is completely and utterly bereft of facts. Therefore, its conclusions are rudderless since they have no reliable scaffolding.

    Conclusion from Plaque One: The Warren Commission was hopelessly biased against Oswald from its inception. Actually before its inception, as we have seen with he cases of Warren, Hoover and Katzenbach. And since each of those men had an integral role to play in the formation and direction of the Commission, the enterprise was doomed from the start. As a criminal investigation, as a prosecutor’s case, and as a fact finding inquiry. The Commission, in all regards, was like the Leaning Tower of Pisa: structurally unsound at its base. Therefore, all of its main tenets, as we shall see, were destined to be specious.

     

    PLAQUE TWO: The Worst Prosecutorial Misconduct Possible

    Posted July 23, 2014.

    Introduction

    As we have seen in Plaque 1, since there was no internal check on it, and no rules of evidence in play, the Warren Commission was essentially a prosecution run amok. And when a prosecutor knows he can do just about anything he wants, he will fiddle with the evidence. We will now list several examples where the Commission altered, discounted, or failed to present important exculpatory evidence in the case against Oswald.

    14. Arlen Specter buried the testimony of FBI agents Jim Sibert and Frank O’Neill.

    Commission counsel Specter had a difficult job. He had to camouflage the medical evidence in the JFK case to minimize the indications of a conspiracy. Sibert and O’Neill were two FBI agents assigned by Hoover to compile a report on Kennedy’s autopsy. Their report and observations would have created insurmountable problems for Specter. Among other things, they maintained that the back wound was actually in the back and not the neck, that this wound did not transit the body, and it entered at a 45-degree angle, which would make it impossible to exit the throat. Years later, when shown the back of the head photos of President Kennedy – which depict no hole, neatly combed hair, and an intact scalp – they both said this was not at all what they recalled. For example, O’Neill and Sibert both recalled a large gaping wound in the back of the skull. Which clearly suggests a shot from the front. (William Matson Law, In the Eye of History, pgs. 168, 245) Neither man was called as a witness, and their report is not in the 26 volumes of evidence appended to the Warren Report. Specter told Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin that Sibert made no contemporaneous notes and O’Neill destroyed his. These are both false. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 121) But they allowed a cover for prosecutor Specter to dispense with evidence that would have vitiated both the Single Bullet Theory and the idea that all shots came from the back.

    15. Arlen Specter never interviewed Admiral George Burkley or produced his death certificate.

    Burkley was an important witness. Not just because he was the president’s personal physician. But because he was the one doctor who was present at both Parkland Hospital and Bethesda Medical Center. (See Roger Feinman’s online book, The Signal and the Noise, Chapter 8.) As Feinman details, Burkley was in the room before Malcolm Perry made his incision for a tracheotomy. Therefore, he likely saw the throat wound before it was slit. But further, on his death certificate, he placed the back wound at the level of the third thoracic vertebra, which would appear to make the trajectory through the throat – and the Single Bullet Theory – quite improbable. (ibid) He also signed the autopsy descriptive sheet as “verified”. This also placed the back wound low (click here). The third thoracic vertebra is about 4-6 inches below the point at which the shoulders meet the neck. As we saw in Plaque One, Gerald Ford revised a draft of the Warren Report to read that the bullet went through the neck, not the back. Burkley’s death certificate would have seriously undermined Ford’s revision.

    How troublesome of a witness could Burkley have been? In 1977, his attorney contacted Richard Sprague, then Chief Counsel of the HSCA. Sprague’s March 18th memo reads that Burkley “. . . had never been interviewed and that he has information in the Kennedy assassination indicating others besides Oswald must have participated.” Later, author Henry Hurt wrote that “. . . in 1982 Dr. Burkley told the author in a telephone conversation that he believed that President Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy.” (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt , p. 49)

    16. The Warren Report distorted the November 22nd impromptu press conference of Dallas doctors Kemp Clark and Malcolm Perry.

    This press conference was particularly troublesome for the official story. Among other things, Dr. Malcolm Perry said three times that the throat wound appeared to be an entrance wound. This would indicate a shot from the front, and therefore a second assassin. Therefore, on page 90 of the Warren Report, a description of Perry’s comments appears which is simply not honest. The report says that Perry answered a series of hypotheticals, he explained how a variety of possibilities could account for JFK’s wounds, and he demonstrated how a single bullet could have caused all of the wounds in the president. This is, at best, an exaggeration.

    On the next page, quoting a newspaper account, the report states that Perry said it was “possible” the neck wound was one of entrance. Perry never said this. And the fact that the report quotes a newspaper account and not the transcript gives the game away. Clearly, the report is trying to negate Perry’s same day evidence of his work on the throat wound, since he had the best view of this wound (click here). In modern parlance, this is called after-the-fact damage control. Attorneys searching for the truth in a murder case should not be participating in such an exercise.

    17. In the entire Warren Report, one will not encounter the name of O. P. Wright.

    Considering the fact that the report is over 800 pages long, this is amazing. Why? Because most people consider Commission Exhibit (CE) 399 one of the most important – if not the most important – piece of evidence in the case. Wright was the man who handed this exhibit over to the Secret Service. This should have made him a key witness in the chain of possession of this bullet. Especially since CE 399 is the fulcrum of the Warren Report. Sometimes called the Magic Bullet, Specter said this projectile went through both Kennedy and Governor Connally making seven wounds and smashing two bones. Without this remarkable bullet path, and without this nearly intact bullet, the wounds necessitate too many bullets to accommodate Specter’s case. In other words, there was a second assassin. So Specter did all he could to try and make the wild ride of CE 399 credible.

    This included eliminating Wright from the report. Why? Because Wright maintained that he did not turn over CE 399 to the Secret Service that day. While describing what he did to author Josiah Thompson, Thompson held up a photo of CE 399 for Wright to inspect. Wright immediately responded that this was not the bullet he gave to the Secret Service. CE 399 is a copper-coated, round-nosed, military jacketed projectile. Wright said that he gave the Secret Service a lead-colored, sharp-nosed, hunting round. (Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)

    Needless to say, with that testimony, in any kind of true legal proceeding, the defense would have moved for a mistrial.

    18. The drawings of Kennedy’s wounds depicted in the Warren Commission are fictional.

    After the Warren Commission was formed, pathologists James Humes and Thornton Boswell met with Specter about 8-10 times. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 119) Specter then arranged a meeting between a young medical artist, Harold Rydberg, and the two pathologists. To this day, Rydberg does not understand why he was chosen to do the medical illustrations for the Warren Commission. (Law, In the Eye of History, p. 293) He had only been studying for about a year. There were vastly more experienced artists available in the area.

    But further, when Humes and Boswell showed up, they had nothing with them: no pictures, no X-rays, no official measurements. Therefore, they verbally told Rydberg about Kennedy’s wounds from memory. Rydberg later deduced that this was done so that no paper trail existed. For the drawings are not done in accordance with the evidence. First, presaging Gerald Ford, the wound in Kennedy’s back is moved up into his neck. Then a slightly downward, straight-line flight path links this fictional neck placement with the throat wound. (See WC, Vol. 16, CE 385, 388)

    The head wound is also wrong. Humes and Boswell placed Kennedy’s head in a much more anteflexed position than the Zapruder film shows. In fact, Josiah Thompson exposed this as a lie when he juxtaposed the Rydberg drawing with a frame from the film. (Thompson, p. 111) Beyond that, the Rydberg drawing of the head wound shows much of the skull bone intact between the entrance, low in the rear skull, and the exit, on the right side above the ear. Yet, in Boswell’s face sheet, he described a gaping 10 by 17 cm. defect near the top of Kennedy’s skull. When Boswell testified, no one asked him why there was a difference between what he told Rydberg and what he wrote on his face sheet. (WC Vol. 2, p. 376 ff)

    19. The most important witness at the murder scene of Officer Tippit was not interviewed by the Warren Commission.

    According to his affidavit, Temple Ford Bowley arrived at the scene of the murder of Officer Tippit when the policeman was already on the ground and appeared dead to him. The key point he makes there is that he looked at his watch and it said 1:10 PM. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 247)

    This is important because the last known witness to see Oswald before the Tippit shooting was Earlene Roberts, his landlady. She saw him through her window. He was outside waiting for a bus – which was going the opposite direction of 10th and Patton, the scene of the Tippit murder. But she pegged the time at 1:04. (ibid, p. 244) It is simply not credible that Oswald could have walked about 9/10 of a mile in six minutes. Or less. Because Bowley told author Joe McBride that when he arrived at he scene, there were already spectators milling around Tippit’s car.

    Bowley’s name is not in the index to the Warren Report, and there is no evidence that the Commission interviewed him.

    20. Two other key witnesses to the Tippit murder were also ignored by the Commission.

    Jim Garrison thought the most important witness to the murder of Tippit was Acquilla Clemons. (On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 197) She said that she saw two men at the scene. One was short and chunky and armed with a gun she saw him reload. The other man was tall and thin. They were in communication with each other, and the shorter man was directed to run the other way from the scene as the taller man. (McBride, p. 492)

    Barry Ernest interviewed another woman named Mrs. Higgins. She lived a few doors down from the scene. When she heard the shots she ran out the front door to look and saw Tippit lying in the street. She caught a glimpse of a man running from the scene with a handgun. She told Barry the man was not Oswald. She also said the time was 1:06. (The Girl on the Stairs, E book version, p. 59)

    Defenders of the Commission have tried to undermine Higgins by saying Tippit radioed in at 1:08. As Hasan Yusuf has pointed out, this depends on which of the radio chronologies submitted to the Warren Commission one picks to use. For in the final version of the radio log, submitted by the FBI, Tippit’s last call in appears to be at about 1:05. (CE 1974, p. 45)

    21. The Commission cannot even accurately tell us when Tippit was pronounced dead.

    How shoddy is the Warren Commission’s chronology of Tippit’s murder?

    They say Tippit was killed at about 1:15 PM. (WR, p. 165) Yet this is the time he was pronounced dead— at Methodist Hospital! Realizing they had a problem, they went to a secondary FBI record. The Bureau had submitted a typed memo based on the records at Hughes Funeral Home. In that typed FBI memo, it said Tippit was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital at 1: 25.

    There is no attempt in the report to reconcile this memo with the actual hospital record. (Click here and scroll down).

    22. There is not a whiff in the Warren Report about the second wallet left at the scene of the Tippit murder.

    One of the first things any high profile, public murder case should do is secure any and all audio or video recordings at the scene. Those exhibits should then be gone over minute by minute in order to secure any important evidence. This was not done in this case. Or if it was done, either the Warren Commission or the FBI failed to make all the results part of the record.

    On the afternoon of the assassination, Channel 8 in Dallas showed a film by station photographer Ron Reiland. Taken at the scene of the Tippit murder, it depicted a policeman opening and showing a billfold to an FBI agent. That the Commission never secured this film for examination speaks reams about its performance. Because, years later, James Hosty revealed in his book Assignment Oswald that fellow FBI agent Bob Barrett told him that the wallet contained ID for Oswald and Alek Hidell! The problem with this is that the Warren Report tells us that the police confiscated Oswald’s wallet and ID in a car transporting him to city hall. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 101-102) This creates a huge problem for the official story. For it clearly suggests that the DPD deep-sixed the wallet from the Tippit scene to escape the implication that 1.) Someone planted Oswald’s ID at the Tippit scene 2.) Because–as Bowley, Clemmons, and Higgins indicate–Oswald was not there.

    23. There is not a whiff in the Warren Report about the Babushka Lady.

    This is the name given to a woman in a trench coat, with a scarf over her head. She is positioned on the grass opposite the grassy knoll, near prominent witnesses Charles Brehm, Jean Hill and Mary Moorman. In other words, to Kennedy’s left. She appears in several films and photographs e.g. the Zapruder film, Muchmore film and Bronson film. The fact that she appears in all of those films and the Commission never appeared to notice her is quite puzzling. But it is made even more so by the following: She has in her hand what appears to be either a still camera or movie camera. And she was using it during the assassination. Because of her location–opposite of Abraham Zapruder–what is on that film may be of the utmost importance. Because you could have a film taken to match up with Abraham Zapruder’s from an opposite angle. It may even contain views of possible assassins atop the knoll.

    There is no evidence that the Commission ever made an attempt to track this witness down through any of its investigative agencies.

    24. The Commission did everything it could to negate the testimony of Victoria Adams.

    Victoria Adams was employed at the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the assassination. Within seconds after hearing the shots, she ran out her office door and down the stairs. Her testimony was always immutable: she neither heard nor saw anyone on those stairs. This posed a serious problem for the Commission. Because their scenario necessitated Oswald tearing down those same stairs right after he took the shots. If Adams did not see or hear him, this clearly indicated Oswald was not on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting.

    So the Commission went about trying to weaken and obfuscate her testimony. David Belin asked her to locate where she stopped on the first floor when she descended. But as Barry Ernest discovered, this exhibit, CE 496, does not include a map of the first floor. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 93) The report says she left her office within a minute of the shooting, when she actually left within a few seconds. (ibid) The Commission then failed to question her corroborating witness Sandy Styles, the girl who followed her out and down the stairs. They then buried a document written by her boss, Dorothy Garner, which further substantiated the fact that she was on the stairs within a few seconds of the shooting. (ibid)

    Adams put a spear through the heart of the Commission’s case. The Commission made sure it didn’t reach that far.

    25. The Commission screened testimony in advance to make sure things they did not like did not enter the record.

    There is more than one example of this. (See Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 232-33) But a vivid and memorable example is what David Belin did with sheriff’s deputy Roger Craig. Craig told author Barry Ernest that when he examined his testimony in the Commission volumes, it was altered 14 times. Craig told Barry the following:

    “When Belin interrogated me – he would ask me questions and, whenever an important question would come up – he would have to know the answer beforehand. He would turn off the recorder and instruct the stenographer to stop taking notes. Then he would ask for the question, and if the answer satisfied him, he would turn the recorder back on, instruct the stenographer to start writing again, and he would ask me the same question and I would answer it.

    However, while the recorder was off, if the answer did not satisfy him, he would turn the recorder back on and instruct the stenographer to start writing again and then he would ask me a completely different question.” Craig added that none of these interruptions were noted in the transcript entered in the Commission volumes. (The Girl on the Stairs, E book version, p.95)

    26. The Warren Commission changed the bullet in the Walker shooting to incriminate Oswald.

    There was no previous firearms violence in Oswald’s past to serve as behavioral precedent for the murders of Kennedy and Tippit. General Edwin Walker had been shot at in April of 1963. The case was unsolved by the Dallas Police as of November, and Oswald had never even been a suspect. In fact, his name appears to have never even been brought up. But if one turns to the Warren Report, one will see that the Commission uses the Walker incident to “indicate that in spite of the belief among those who knew him that he was apparently not dangerous, Oswald did not lack the determination and other traits required to carry out a carefully planned killing of another human being…” (WR, p. 406)

    There is one major problem with this verdict (among others). If Oswald misfired at Walker, it would have to have been done with a rifle different than the one the Commission says he used in Dealey Plaza. Because the projectile recovered from the Walker home was described by the Dallas Police as being a steel-jacketed 30.06 bullet. (See Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 49 and the General Offense Report of 4/10/63 filed by officers Van Cleave and McElroy.)

    There is no evidence Oswald ever had this kind of rifle. And the Warren Report never notes this discrepancy in the ammunition used in the Walker shooting versus the Kennedy murder.

    Conclusion

    This section could go on and on and on. Because the record of evidence manipulation by the Commission and its agents is so voluminous as to be book length. But what this plaque does is show that the bias demonstrated in Plaque 1 was then actively implemented by the Warren Commission. To the point that it accepted altered exhibits, allowed testimony to be censored and screened, and deep-sixed important testimony and evidence it did not want to entertain.

    Therefore, the Commission can be shown to be untrustworthy in its presentation of facts and evidence. Especially revealing is that none of this seems random or careless. All of these alterations point in one direction: to incriminate Oswald. As New York Homicide chief Robert Tanenbaum once said about the Warren Commission, he was taken aback by the amount of exculpatory evidence that the Warren Report left out, and also the major problems with the breaks in the evidentiary trail. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 65) What makes this even more shocking is that every single member of the Commission was a lawyer, as was every staff member. In their almost messianic zeal to convict Oswald, they all seem to have utterly forgotten about the rules of evidence and the canon of legal ethics.

     

    PLAQUE THREE: The Warren Commission Manufactures the Case Against Oswald

    Posted July 30, 2014

    Introduction

    In Plaque 1, we showed the insurmountable bias the Warren Commission had against Oswald at the very start. Nor was there a minority to check the excesses of a majority fact finding function. The last did not exist because what constituted the minority; Sen. Russell, Rep. Boggs, Sen. Cooper; were completely marginalized. In fact, we now have this in writing. On his blog, Commission administrator Howard Willens, has posted his diary. In his discussion of a Secret Service matter, Willens writes the following. “Apparently at least Congressman Ford and Mr. Dulles felt that PRS is not adequate to do the job. The two remaining members of the Commission, the Chief Justice and Mr. McCloy disagreed on this issue.” (italics added) Can it be more clear? If the remaining members besides Dulles and Ford were Warren and McCloy, then for Willens, the Commission did not include Russell, Boggs and Cooper. That takes marginalization as far as it can be taken. There simply was no internal check on the majority who were hell bent on railroading Oswald.

    In Plaque 2, we showed that the Commission, because of its innate bias, would then manipulate, discount or eliminate evidence. We will now show how the evidentiary record was fabricated to make Oswald into something he was not: an assassin.

    27. Oswald’s SR 71 money order.

    The SR 71 was the fastest plane that ever flew. It achieved speeds up to, and over, Mach III. Unfortunately for the Warren Report, the post office never used this plane to carry mail from one city to another.

    The Warren Report tells us that Oswald mailed his money order for a rifle on March 12, 1963. It then tells us that the money order arrived at Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago and was deposited at its bank the next day. (WR, p. 119) This is how Oswald allegedly ordered the rifle that killed Kennedy.

    Chicago is about 700 miles from Dallas. Recall, 1963 was way before the advent of computer technology for the post office. It was even before the advent of zip codes. But we are to believe the following: The USPS picked up a money order from a mailbox. They then transported it to the nearest post office. There, it was sorted and shipped out to the airport. It flew to Chicago. It was picked up at the airport there and driven to the main post office. There, it was sorted, placed on a truck and driven to the regional post office. It was then given to a route carrier and he delivered it to Klein’s. After its arrival at Klein’s it was then sorted out according to four categories of origin (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 451) Klein’s then delivered it to their financial repository, the first National Bank of Chicago. There it was deposited in Klein’s account.

    The Warren Report says that all of this happened in a less than 24 hour period. To which we reply with one word: Really?

    28. The invisibly deposited money order.

    This money order was made out for $21.45. Robert Wilmouth was a Vice-President of the First National Bank of Chicago. According to him, the money order should have had four separate stamps on it as it progressed through his bank and the Federal Reserve system. (ibid)

    If such was the case, when one turns to look at this money order, one is surprised at its appearance. (See Volume 17, pgs. 677-78) For it bears none of the markings described by Wilmouth. The only stamp on it is the one prepared by Klein’s for initial deposit. Needless to say, Wilmouth did not testify before the Commission.

    But further, if one looks in the Commission volumes for other checks deposited by Oswald, e.g. from Leslie Welding, Reily Coffee, and Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, one will see that these are properly stamped. (See, for example, Vol. 24 pgs. 886-90)

    29. The invisible money order drop off.

    From the markings on the envelope, the money order was mailed prior to 10:30 AM on March 12, 1963. The problem is that Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, where Oswald was working at the time, recorded each assignment an employee did during the day. They also recorded how much time he spent on each assignment. When one checks on his assignment sheet for March 12th, one will see that Oswald was continually busy from 8:00 AM until 12:15 PM. (Commission Exhibit 1855, Vol. 23, p. 605) Further, as Gil Jesus has discovered, the HSCA inquiry said the post office where Oswald bought the money order from opened at 8:00 AM. (Box 50, HSCA Segregated CIA files.)

    So when did Oswald mail the money order? Even though Oswald’s time sheet is in the volumes, the Warren Report does not point out this discrepancy. Let alone explain it.

    30. The invisible rifle pick up.

    It’s hard to believe but it appears to be true. In its ten-month investigation, the Warren Commission, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the post office could never produce a single postal employee who gave, or even witnessed the transfer of the rifle to Oswald. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 62, Armstrong, p. 477) In fact, there is no evidence that Oswald ever actually picked up this rifle at the post office. For instance we don’t even know the day on which the rifle was retrieved.

    Maybe that is because the transaction should not have occurred the way the Commission says it did. The rifle was ordered in the name of A. Hidell. But the post office box it arrived at was in the name of Lee Oswald. (ibid) Postal regulations at the time dictated that if a piece of merchandise addressed to one person arrived at a different person’s box; which was the case here; it was to be returned to the sender. Therefore, this rifle should have never gotten to Oswald’s box.

    The Commission had an ingenious way to get around this problem. They wrote that the portion of the postal application Oswald made out listing others who could pick up merchandise at his box was thrown out after the box was closed in May. (WR, p. 121) The report says this was done in accordance with postal rules. Yet, if this was so, why did the post office not discard his application for his New Orleans box?

    Because the Commission was lying. Stewart Galanor wrote the post office in 1966 and asked how long post office box applications were kept in 1963. The answer was for two years after the box was closed.

    31. The rifle the Commission says Oswald ordered is not the rifle the Commission says killed Kennedy.

    This one is shocking even for the Warren Commission. The Commission says that Oswald ordered a 36-inch, 5.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano carbine rifle. But this is not the rifle entered into evidence by the Dallas Police. That rifle is a 40.2 inch, 7.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano short rifle. Again, this discrepancy is never noted by the Commission nor is it in the Warren Report. (Armstrong, p. 477)

    This issue is so disturbing for Commission defenders that they now say that Klein’s shipped Oswald the wrong rifle because they were out of the 36 inch carbine. To which the reply must be: And they never advised him of this first? When a mail order house is out of a product, they usually tell the customer that, and ask him if he wishes to change the order. At least that is this writer’s experience. There is no evidence or testimony in the record that any such thing happened in this case. Even in interviews of the executives from Klein’s.

    There is evidence the Warren Commission knew this was a serious problem. This is why they entered into the record an irrelevant page from the November, 1963 issue of Field and Stream. This issue did carry an ad for the 40 inch rifle. But the magazine the commission decided Oswald ordered the rifle from was the February 1963 issue of American Rifleman. (Armstrong, p. 477, WC Vol. 20, p. 174)

    32. Arlen Specter did not show Darrell Tomlinson CE 399.

    As we showed in Plaque 2, O. P. Wright’s name is not in the Warren Report. But Arlen Specter did question Darrell Tomlinson. He was the hospital employee who recovered CE 399 and gave it to Wright. In the reports of the questioning of Tomlinson, and in his Warren Commission testimony, there is no evidence that Specter ever showed Tomlinson CE 399. (WC Vol. 6, pgs. 128-34)

    To say this is highly irregular is soft-pedaling it. Wright and Tomlinson are the two men who recovered CE 399 and started it on its journey to the Secret Service and then the FBI lab that night. To not ask the two men who began the chain of possession; in fact, to totally ignore one of them; to certify their exhibit is more than stunning. It invites suspicion. The next point illustrates why.

    33. The Warren Commission accepted a lie by Hoover on the validity of CE 399.

    This was a mistake of the first order. Because it was later discovered that the FBI fabricated evidence to cover up the falsification of CE 399. As Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson later discovered, the man who the FBI said got identifications of CE 399 from Wright and Tomlinson was agent Bardwell Odum. According to Commission Exhibit 2011, when Odum showed the bullet to these two hospital employees, their reply was it “appears to be the same one” but they could not “positively identify it.” (The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 282)

    That in itself was a nebulous reply to an important question. But it turned out that it concealed something even worse. For when Aguilar and Thompson visited Odum and asked him about this identification, he denied it ever happened. He said he never showed any bullet to any hospital employees concerning the Kennedy assassination. And if he did he would have recalled it. Because he knew Wright and he also would have filed his own report on it. Which he did not. (ibid, p. 284)

    34. Hoover lied about Elmer Lee Todd’s initials.

    There was another lie Hoover told about CE 399. He said that agent Elmer Lee Todd initialed the bullet. (WC Vol 24, p. 412) This turned out to be false. The Commission never examined the exhibit to see if Todd’s initials are on the bullet. Many years later, researcher John Hunt did so. He found they were not there (click here).

    35. Robert Frazier’s work records proved the lie about CE 399, and the Commission never requested them.

    But beyond that, Hunt’s work with Frazier’s records revealed something perhaps even more disturbing. Todd wrote that he got the bullet from Secret Service Chief Jim Rowley at 8:50 PM. He then drove it to Frazier at the FBI lab. But Frazier’s work records say that he received the “stretcher bullet” at 7:30. How could he have done so if Todd was not there yet? (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 227)

    From this evidence, either CE 399 was substituted or there were two bullets delivered, and one was made to disappear. Either way, the Commission fell for a phony story by Hoover (click here).

    36. CE 543 could not have been fired that day.

    The Commission tells us that there were three shells found near the sixth floor window, the so-called “sniper’s nest.” But one of these shells, CE 543, could not have been fired that day. As ballistics expert Howard Donahue has noted, this shell could not have been used to fire a rifle that day. For the rifle would not have worked properly. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 69) It also contains three sets of identifying marks which reveal it had been loaded and extracted three times before. It also has marks on it from the magazine follower. But the magazine follower only marks the last cartridge in a clip. Which this was not. (Thompson, p. 145)

    Historian Michael Kurtz consulted with forensic pathologist Forest Chapman about this exhibit. He then wrote that the shell “lacks the characteristic indentation on the side made by the firing chamber of Oswald’s rifle.” (Kurtz, Crime of the Century, second edition, p. 51) Chapman concluded that CE 543 was probably dry loaded. The pathologist noted “CE 543 had a deeper and more concave indentation on its base…where the firing pin strikes the case. Only empty cases exhibit such characteristics.” (ibid, p. 52)

    This was certified through experimentation by British researcher Chris Mills. He purchased a Mannlicher Carcano and then experimented repeatedly. The only way he achieved a similar denting effect was by using empty shells. And then the effect only appeared infrequently. Mills concluded this denting effect could only occur with an empty case that had been previously fired, and then only on occasion. (op cit. DiEugenio, p. 69)

    37. In addition to the Commission presenting the wrong rifle, the wrong bullet and the wrong shell, it’s also the wrong bag.

    The Commission tells us that Oswald carried a rifle to work the day of the assassination in a long brown bag. Wesley Frazier and his sister said the bag was carried by Oswald under his arm. The problems with this story are manifold. For instance, there is no photo of this bag in situ taken by the Dallas Police. The eventual paper bag produced by the police had no traces of oil or grease on it even though the rifle had been soaked in a lubricant called Cosmoline for storage purposes.(DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 177) Though the rifle had to be dissembled to fit under Oswald’s armpit, the FBI found no bulges or creases in the paper.

    Further, after a long and detailed analysis by Pat Speer, it appears that the bag in evidence did not match the Depository paper samples. (ibid, p. 179) Further, the police did not officially photograph the alleged gun sack until November 26th!

    All this strongly indicates that the bag the police brought outside the depository is not the same one in evidence today. (Click here for proof).

    38. The Commission now had to alter testimony in order to match the phony evidence of the wrong gun, the wrong bullet, the wrong shell and the wrong bag. They did.

    It was now necessary to place Oswald on the sixth floor in proximity to the southeast window. The Commission’s agents therefore got several people to alter their testimony. For instance, Harold Norman was on the fifth floor that day. He said nothing about hearing shells drop above him in his first FBI interview. Coaxed along by Secret Service agent Elmer Moore, he now vividly recalled shell casings dropping for a convenient three times.(DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 30-31.)

    In his first DPD and FBI interviews, Depository worker Charles Givens said he had seen Oswald on the first floor lunchroom at about 11:50 AM, after he had sent up an elevator for him while they were working on the sixth floor. But when he testified before the Commission, Givens now added something completely new. Now he said that he forgot his cigarettes and went up to the sixth floor for them. There he conveniently saw Oswald near the southeast window. As many researchers, including Sylvia Meagher and Pat Speer have shown, it’s pretty clear that the Dallas Police, specifically, Lt. Revill got Givens to change his story. The Commission, which was aware of the switch, accepted the revised version. (ibid, p. 98).

    Carolyn Arnold was a secretary working in the depository. She was interviewed by the FBI after the assassination. She told them she saw Oswald on the first floor at about 12:25. Years later, reporter Earl Golz showed her what the FBI had written about her. She was shocked. They had altered her statement to read that she saw him “a few minutes before 12:15 PM.” (ibid, p. 96)

    With Oswald now transported up to the sixth floor, there was only Marina Oswald left. In her first Secret Service interviews, she had told the agents she had never seen a rifle with a scope. In fact, she did not even know such rifles existed. Which created a problem. Because the weapon in question did have a scope. Threatened with deportation, when she arrived for her Warren Commission testimony she was confronted with the scoped rifle. She now proclaimed “This is the fateful rifle of Lee Oswald.” (ibid, pgs.62- 63)

    39. The WC never found any evidence that Oswald picked up the handgun with which it says Tippit was killed.

    This weapon was shipped through the Railroad Express Agency. REA was a forerunner to private mail companies like Federal Express. When one looks at the evidence exhibits in the Warren Report one will see something strange. There is no evidence that Oswald ever picked up this revolver. In fact, the evidence trail stops right there. That is, at the point one would report to REA, show some ID, pay for the weapon, sign off on a receipt, and get a matching one. (WR, p. 173)

    In fact, from the evidence adduced in the report, it does not even appear that the FBI visited REA. Which would be unfathomable. It is more likely they did visit and encountered the same situation there as at the post office with the rifle: No receipts, or witnesses, to attest to the pick-up.

    40. The ballistics evidence in the Tippit case is fishy.

    As many have noted, including Jim Garrison, the Dallas Police could not get the bullets expended in the Tippit case to match the alleged handgun used. (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 199) They only sent one bullet to Washington, even though four were fired at Tippit. Further, on the day of the murder, Dallas police made out an inventory of evidence at the scene. That inventory did not include cartridge cases of any kind. (ibid, p. 200) These were not added until six days after the police got a report that he FBI could not match the bullets to the weapon.

    Just as odd: the shell casings do not match the bullets. Three of the bullets were copper coated and made by Winchester. One bullet was lead colored and made by Remington. But two of the cartridges were from Winchester and two were made by Remington. (ibid, p. 201)

    There is evidence that the shells found at the scene are not those in evidence. Sgt. Gerald Hill allegedly instructed Officer J. M. Poe to mark two of the shells. When Poe examined them for the Commission, he could not detect his markings on the shells. (ibid)

    As Garrison suggested, this sorry trail indicates that once the police could not get a match for the bullets, they then fired the handgun to make sure they had a match for the shells. Even if they were not the same ones found at the scene. The Commission accepted this.

    Conclusion

    The Warren Commission misrepresented its own evidence. As we saw in Plaque 1, from its inception, the Commission had an overwhelming bias against Lee Oswald. And since Oswald was given no defense, and there were no restraints placed upon its bias, the Commission became a runaway prosecution. One which altered testimony and evidence, and accepted the most outlandish proclamations without crosschecking them.

    There is actually internal documentary evidence to prove this point. In late April of 1964, staff administrator Norman Redlich wrote a memo to Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin. Discovered by researcher David Josephs, it is a startling letter, one which shows that the Commission literally made up its case as it went along. In discussing the three shot scenario, Redlich is still maintaining that all three shots hit targets: the first into Kennedy, the second into Gov. Connally, and the last into Kennedy’s skull. Yet, this will not be what the Warren Report concludes.

    But Redlich also writes that “As our investigation now stands, however, we have not shown that these events could possibly have occurred in the manner suggested above.” He also writes that the first shot was probably fired at Zapruder frame 190. This was also changed in the final report since it would have necessitated firing through the branches of an oak tree. He concludes with this: “I should add that the facts which we now have in our possession, submitted to us in separate reports from the FBI and Secret Service are totally incorrect, and if left uncorrected will present a completely misleading picture.”

    The problem is this: the FBI and Secret Service were the two prime sources of information for the Commission. (WR, p. xii) Responsible for about 90% of the raw material they had. If these were “incorrect,” then what would the Commission do to “correct” them?

    This memo can be read here.

     

    PLAQUE FOUR: Specter covers up the Medical Evidence

    Posted September 7, 2014

    Introduction

    With what is known about the medical evidence in the JFK case today, looking back at what the Warren Commission did with it in 1964 is almost staggering. Today, with the work of writers like Gary Aguilar, David Mantik, Milicent Cranor, William Law, Pat Speer, and Cyril Wecht, no objective person can deny that something went seriously wrong at the Kennedy autopsy in Bethesda, Maryland. In light of that, the work that the Commission did with this evidence in ’64 needs to be analyzed to appreciate just how careful Arlen Specter was in navigating a minefield.

    41. Although President Kennedy was killed by a bullet wound to the skull, that wound was never dissected by lead pathologist James Humes.

    This fact is unbelievable. In any high profile homicide case in which the victim is killed by a bullet wound, it is standard procedure to track the trajectory of the fatal wound through the body. This has to be done in order to trace the bullet path, to test if the wound is a transiting one, and to note where it entered and exited. All of this information would be crucial as forensic evidence during a legal proceeding.

    The problem is that the Warren Commission was not at all forensic, nor was it a legal proceeding. It was not even a respectable fact finding commission. Shockingly, outside of printing some primary documents, the medical aspects of this case are dealt with in just seven pages in the Warren Report. (pgs. 85-92) In that section, it is not revealed why the head wound was not sectioned. In fact, the report does not even admit there was no sectioning of the brain. In Volume II of the Commission evidence, Arlen Specter never brings up the lack of sectioning of the brain in his examination of James Humes.

    And to add further to the incredulity, the supplemental report to the autopsy, which deals with the skull wound, also does not admit there was no sectioning. (See WR pgs. 544-45)

    42. Without comment, the Warren Report says that President Kennedy’s brain weighed 1500 grams.

    In that supplemental report, it says that after formalin fixation, Kennedy’s brain weighed 1500 grams. (WR, p. 544) There is no comment on this in the 800 pages of the Warren Report. There should have been much comment about it. Why? Because the average weight of a brain for a 40-49 year old man is 1350 grams. Even allowing for the formalin fixing, Kennedy’s brain weight has more volume than it should.

    Which is surprising considering the reports on the condition of the brain. FBI agent Frank O’Neill said half the brain was gone and a significant portion was missing from the rear. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 137) Dr. Thornton Boswell, Humes’ fellow pathologist, said about a third of the brain was missing. Humes himself said about 2/3 of the cerebrum was gone. (ibid) Floyd Reibe, a photographic assistant, said only about half the brain was left when he saw it removed. Jim Sibert, O’Neill’s fellow FBI agent at the autopsy said, “you look at a picture, an anatomical picture of a brain and it’s all there; there was nothing like that.” (ibid) The list of witnesses to how disrupted the brain was could go on and on.

    The point is, given all this testimony, plus what we see happening in the Zapruder film–a terrific head explosion, with matter ejecting high into the air; how could the volume of the brain be what it is reported as? That is, larger than normal.

    If you can believe it, and you can by now, in the entire examination of James Humes, Arlen Specter never even surfaced the issue of the extraordinary weight of the brain. (WC Vol. II, pgs. 348-376) Neither did it come up in the examinations of assistants Thornton Boswell or Pierre Finck. (ibid, pgs. 376-84) Since it was in the record for all concerned to see, that fact clearly suggests deliberate avoidance.

    43. Kennedy’s back wound was not dissected.

    As noted in point 41, Kennedy’s fatal skull wound was not sectioned. Neither was the other wound the Commission says he sustained, the wound to his back. (Which as we saw, Gerald Ford transferred to his neck.) Again, this has to be the first, perhaps only, high profile murder case by gunfire, in which neither wound sustained by the victim was tracked.

    In the examinations of Humes, Boswell, and Pierre Finck, this question is never brought up by Specter. That is: Why did none of the doctors dissect the track of this back wound. Again, this was crucial in determining directionality, if the wound was a transiting one, and if it was, points of entrance and exit. Because there has been so much debate about the nature of this wound, in retrospect, this was a key failing of an autopsy procedure which many have called, one of the worst ever. And that includes Dr. Michael Baden of the HSCA. (DiEugenio, op. cit, p. 114)

    The reason Specter never asked why finally surfaced in 1969 at the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans. Called as a witness by Shaw’s defense team, under cross-examination by assistant DA Al Oser, Finck exposed much of the secrecy and subterfuge around the autopsy.

    Finck revealed that the three autopsy doctors were not really in charge. He said that there were a number of military officers there; a fact which Humes covered up in his Commission testimony; and they actually limited what the doctors were doing. (See James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 300) To the point that a frustrated Humes asked, “Who is in charge here?” An Army General then replied, “I am.” (ibid)

    When Oser tried to get Finck to answer the question Specter had deliberately ignored–namely why was the back wound not tracked–Finck clearly did not want to answer the question. Oser had to pose the query eight times. He even had to ask the judge to direct the witness to reply. Finck finally said, “As I recall I was told not to but I don’t remember by whom.” (ibid, p. 302) One can imagine the impact that confession would have had if it had been printed in the Warren Report. The obvious question then would have been: Why did certain people in the autopsy room not want the back wound dissected? Specter was sure to avoid that Pandora’s Box.

    44. Arlen Specter’s questioning of Thornton Boswell was a travesty.

    As Walt Brown notes in his book, The Warren Omission, Specter asked Boswell a total of 14 questions. When one subtracts the formalities, like tracing his education, that number is reduced to 8. (WC, Vol. II, p. 377)

    Which is shocking. Because, for instance, of the controversy surrounding the face sheet which he allegedly prepared. That sheet places the posterior back wound well down into the back. In fact, in a place which corresponds to the evidence of the blood and holes in Kennedy’s back and shirt. It also allows for a rather large wound in the skull. This wound is not visible in either the autopsy photos or x-rays.

    To ask such a key witness, who had such crucial information, just 8 relevant questions tells us what we need to know about Arlen Specter and his intentions as attorney for the Warren Commission. He was on a mission to conceal, not reveal.

    45. The Commission slept through some of James Humes’ most revealing testimony.

    In Volume II of the Commission volumes, James Humes made some puzzling and disturbing comments.

    In responding to comments by Sen. John Cooper about determining the angle of the bullets from the Texas School Book Depository for the head shot, he said that this could not be done with accuracy, since the exit hole was too broad. But yet, this was not the question. The question was if he could determine the angle from the position Kennedy was in when he was struck. (p. 360) According to the Commission, they knew where this shot was fired from, and Humes indicated where it struck on the rear of the skull. (See Vol. 2, p. 351)

    When Allen Dulles then tried to nail the location down by asking if the bullet was inconsistent with a shot from either behind or from the side, Humes made a reply that is mysterious to this day. He said, “Scientifically, sir, it is impossible for it to have been fired from other than behind. Or to have exited from other than behind.” (ibid, italics added) If the bullet exited from behind it was fired from the front. Stunningly, no one asked him to clarify what he meant by this. In fact, the next question, from John McCloy, was if he thought the head wound was a lethal one. Recall, the Commission had seen the Zapruder film several times.

    As some have said, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

    46. Humes and Specter cooperated on a cover story as to why Humes destroyed the first draft of his autopsy report.

    James Humes originally stated that the reason he burned the first draft of his autopsy report was because he did not want the blood stained report to come into the possession of some cheap souvenir hunter. (WC, Vol. II p. 373)

    Over three decades later, in 1996, under questioning by Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn of the Assassination Records Review Board, this story fell apart. Because Gunn honed in on the fact that the report was written in the privacy of his own home. It is hard to believe that Humes did not wash up before he left the morgue. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 165)

    But further, it was revealed that Humes also burned his unsoiled notes along with the first draft. Deeply agitated, and now outside the friendly patty cake of Specter’s cooperation, Humes began to come unglued. He offered up the startling excuse that, “it was my own materials.” (ibid)

    This leaves two problems. First, what was the real reason Humes burned his report? Second, if he burned his notes, then how does one compare what is in the report with what it is supposed to be based upon?

    47. The Commission lied about not having possession of the autopsy materials.

    On January 21, 1964, Commissioner John McCloy asked J. Lee Rankin if the Commission had all the autopsy materials, including color photographs, in their offices. Rankin replied that yes they did. (See p. 36 of transcript) But according to Warren Commission historian Gerald McKnight, this information was kept hidden from most all of the Commission staff. (McKnight, p.171) The exception being Specter who was shown a photo by Secret Service agent Elmer Moore, Earl Warren’s “bodyguard.” (Specter alluded to this at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Symposium in 2003)

    Rankin’s reply to McCloy is disturbing. Because at almost every opportunity in the intervening decades, the Commissioners and counsel had denied they had the materials. But further, they tried to say they did not have them because the Kennedy family denied them access. This was simply not possible. Because these materials, including photos and x-rays, were in the possession–and under the control–of the Secret Service at that time. Which is how Moore had them. So the Commission had to have gotten them from the Secret Service.

    48. In the entire Warren Report, there is no mention of the Harper Fragment.

    The Harper fragment is a crucial piece of forensic evidence. It was named after Billy Harper, the person who found this piece of bone in Dealey Plaza while taking photos on the 23rd. He brought it to his uncle, Dr. Jack Harper, who took it to Dr. A. B. Cairns, chief of pathology at Methodist Hospital in Dallas. Cairns determined it was occipital bone, from the rear of JFK’s head. He also had quality color slides made of both sides of the fragment. This is fortunate, since this piece of evidence has now disappeared.

    Among the important points to remember about the Harper fragment is that, if it is occipital, then it strongly suggests a shot from the front. Secondly, when the House Select Committee tried to place the Harper fragment in their own reconstruction, situated to the front right side of the skull, it did not fit. And the HSCA tried to then ditch the evidence proving it did not. (See Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, by Michael Benson, p. 173; John Hunt, “A Demonstrable Impossibility” at History Matters website)

    For the Commission to try and determine the nature of Kennedy’s head wounds without even noting this piece of evidence is irresponsible.

    49. James Humes lied about the diameter of Kennedy’s anterior neck wound in his testimony.

    Under examination by Specter, Humes said the neck wound measured a few millimeters in diameter. (See WC, Vol. II, p. 362) Since this wound was slit at Parkland Hospital in Dallas for purposes of a tracheotomy, Humes could not have garnered this information on his own. It turns out he got it from Dr. Malcolm Perry, the man who did the tracheotomy. But when one looks at the notation made about this information, it does not say a few millimeters. It says 3-5 mm. (See James Rinnovatore and Allan Eaglesham, The JFK Assassination Revisited, p. 26 for the note)

    The probable reason Humes fudged his testimony was that he had testified that the posterior back wound was 7 x 4 mm. (WC Vol. II, p. 351) This would have meant the entrance wound was larger than the exit wound. Something that could only happen in the solipsistic world of the Warren Commission.

    50. James Humes and Arlen Specter cooperated on a cover story to conceal the true location of Kennedy’s back wound for the Commission.

    Under questioning by Specter, Humes said that the bullet holes in Kennedy’s jacket and shirt line up well with Commission Exhibit 385. (WC, Vol II, p. 366) The bullet holes in those two clothing exhibits both depict the wound to have entered in JFK’s back about six inches below the collar. Which Humes admits to. Anyone can see that CE 385 depicts that wound much further up, near where the neck meets the back. (Click here)

    So how do Specter and Humes explain this deliberate misrepresentation? They say Kennedy was heavily muscled and waving at the crowd. (WC, op. cit) Kennedy was not heavily muscled. He was about 6′ 1″ and 175 pounds. Anyone who has seen photos of him in a swimsuit or at autopsy will tell you he was rather slender. And there is no way in the world that the very mild wave Kennedy performs before he goes behind the freeway sign could account for the raising of that six inch differential. In fact, when Kennedy starts waving, his elbow is on the car door. (Click here)

    These misrepresentations are deliberately designed to cover up the fraud of CE 385. And, in turn, to make the wild fantasy of the Single Bullet Theory palatable.

    Conclusion

    Arlen Specter clearly understood that there were serious problems with the evidence of the autopsy in the JFK case. Which is why, as previously noted, he deep-sixed the Sibert-O’Neill report made by the FBI.

    The questioning of the three pathologists by Specter was a masterpiece of avoidance. Or, in plain language, a cover up. The true facts of this horrendous autopsy did not begin to be exposed until the trial of Clay Shaw–five years later in New Orleans. There, under a real examination, Pierre Finck first revealed that the doctors were not running the autopsy. The scores of officers in the room were. This explains why the back wound was not dissected and the brain not sectioned. Without those two practices, we do not know the direction of the bullets through the skull, throat and back; nor do we know how many bullets struck; nor do we know if all the wounds were transiting.

    Because of Specter, we also did not discover the real circumstances of Dr. Humes burning his first autopsy draft and notes. And because of Specter and Humes cooperation on a deception, the true nature of Kennedy’s back wound, and the problems in connecting it with the throat wound, were camouflaged. All of these dodges, and more, were meant to disguise evidence of more than three shots. And therefore, more than one assassin.

    If the Commission had been a true legal proceeding, Specter’s actions would have been just cause to begin a disbarment case against him.

     

    PLAQUE FIVE: The Conspiracy the Commission Couldn’t Find

    Posted September 24, 2014

    Introduction

    In this final series, we will center on information that most certainly indicated a plot, or at least suggested a conspiratorial set of associations in the JFK case. Almost all the material discussed here was available back in 1964. The problem was that the agencies that the Commission relied upon were not forthcoming in forwarding the facts to the Commission. In other words, the Commission was more or less at the mercy of men like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, James Rowley and Elmer Moore at the Secret Service, and Richard Helms and James Angleton at the CIA. Since those three agencies provided the overwhelming majority of information to the Commission, the investigation was doomed from the start.

    51. Within 72 hours of the assassination, David Ferrie was trying to deny his association with Oswald. And he broke the law to do so.

    After Jim Garrison turned Ferrie over to the FBI, Oswald’s longtime friend and CAP colleague lied his head off to the Bureau. He said he never owned a telescopic rifle, or used one, and he would not even know how to use one. Considering his activities as a CIA trainer for the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose, these were clear deceptions.

    He also said he never knew Oswald and that Oswald was not a member of a CAP squadron in New Orleans.

    He then said he did not know Sergio Arcacha Smith from 544 Camp Street, and he had no association with any Cuban exile group since 1961. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 177)

    Every one of these statements was a lie. Further, it is a crime to perjure yourself to an FBI agent in an investigation. (ibid) That Hoover did not indict Ferrie, shows that 1.) He did not give a damn about Kennedy’s murder and 2.) The Commission was at his mercy.

    52. The FBI knew about Ferrie’s friendship with Oswald through CAP member Chuck Francis, and they knew about the association of Oswald with Ferrie and Shaw in the Clinton-Jackson area.

    What makes Point 51 above even worse is that the Bureau had the evidence to prove Ferrie was lying to them. After the assassination, CAP member Chuck Francis was interviewed by the Bureau. Francis took the now famous CAP photo depicting Ferrie with Oswald at a picnic. (ibid, p. 233) How could Ferrie have denied that evidence? In fact, he was worried about it. Since in the days following the assassination, he called various CAP members to see if they had any pictures of him with Oswald. The FBI knew about these frantic calls also. (ibid) As Vincent Bugliosi would say, the perjury by Ferrie plus his attempt at obstruction of justice would indicate a “consciousness of guilt.”

    Through the work of Joan Mellen, we know that the Bureau had a report by Reeves Morgan that Oswald had been in the Clinton/Jackson area that summer with two men who fit the description of Ferrie and Clay Shaw. The FBI then visited the hospital personnel office where Oswald went to apply for a job. (ibid)

    There is no evidence that Hoover forwarded any of this important information to the Commission.

    53. Both the CIA and the FBI had counter-intelligence programs active in 1963 against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

    At the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, Commission counsel David Belin was one of the featured guests on a Nightline segment. During the telecast he made an astonishing declaration: He proclaimed he had seen every CIA document on the Kennedy case. If he was telling the truth, then why did he not say that the Agency, as well as the Bureau, had counter-intelligence programs arrayed against the FPCC in 1963, and that David Phillips headed the CIA operation? (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 236)

    This would seem to most to be of extreme evidentiary importance. Because Oswald formed his own one-man operation for the FPCC in New Orleans while working out of Guy Banister’s office. In fact, he even put Banister’s address on some of his FPCC flyers. And the FBI knew that also. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 102) Needless to say, this would all seem to suggest that perhaps Oswald was not really a communist; but at work, through Banister’s office, for Phillips’ anti-FPCC campaign.

    Which leads us to an amazing fact.

    54. You will not find the name of David Phillips in the 19,000 pages of the Commission volumes.

    In retrospect, this is startling. Why? Because today Phillips is seen as one of the chief mid-level suspects in the Kennedy case. Oswald was seen with Phillips at the Southland Building in Dallas in late summer of 1963. Phillips occupied the Cuban desk in Mexico City while Oswald was allegedly there in late September and early October, 1963. And if Oswald was an agent provocateur for the CIA infiltrating the FPCC, then Phillips had to have known about his activities in New Orleans that summer. Since he was in charge of coordinating them.

    In other words, Phillips seems to have been in direct proximity to Oswald throughout 1963. In fact, he told his brother James before he died that he was in Dallas the day JFK was killed. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 364)

    55. There is direct evidence and testimony linking Phillips to suspects in the JFK case in New Orleans.

    After Gordon Novel first met Sergio Arcacha Smith, Arcacha invited him to a meeting in Guy Banister’s office. The subject was arranging a telethon in New Orleans to support the anti-Castro cause. Joining the trio was a fourth man, a Mr. Phillips. In a sworn deposition, Novel’s description of Mr. Phillips closely aligns with David Phillips. (See William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pgs. 22-24)

    Secondly, in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, the CIA made a report on the Belle Chasse training camp south of New Orleans. Ferrie and Arcacha Smith were both heavily involved in this camp’s activities. (ibid, p. 30) That report is detailed in all aspects of the history of the camp including when it opened, who was trained there, how many were trained, and what they were trained in. Only someone with firsthand knowledge of its activities could have written the memo. At the end, the memo reads, “the training camp was entirely Agency controlled and the training was conducted by Agency personnel.” The memo was signed by Phillips. (ibid, p. 31)

    Third, during the preparations for Operation Mongoose, another camp was opened across Lake Pontchartrain. Ferrie was a drill instructor at this camp also. (ibid, p. 30) When Bob Tanenbaum was Deputy Chief Counsel of the HSCA, he saw a film that was probably from this camp. He brought in witnesses to view it to get positive identifications. Three of the identified men were Oswald, Banister and Phillips. (ibid, p. 30)

    As the reader can see, we now have evidence linking the people on the ground around Oswald in the summer of 1963, with a man one or two steps upward in the CIA’s chain of command. This would be an important development if one were seeking out a conspiracy.

    56. The names of Rose Cheramie and Richard Case Nagell are not in the Warren Report.

    Along with Sylvia Odio, this trio forms perhaps the most important evidence of a conspiracy before the fact. In fact, Jim Garrison once wrote that Nagell was the most important witness there was. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 94) Nagell was a CIA operative who was hired out of Mexico City by the KGB. They heard there was a plot brewing to kill Kennedy. They thought they would be implicated in it. They hired Nagell to track it down. (ibid, pgs. 95-96) By the fall of 1963, Nagell was hot on the trail of David Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith, and Carlos Quiroga. He was convinced that Oswald, who the KGB had given him a photo of at the start, was being set up by these men. (ibid, p. 97)

    Rose Cheramie predicted the assassination in advance. She had been abandoned by two men who were talking about the plot as the trio was enacting a drug deal. After she was abandoned, she was having withdrawal symptoms. But she predicted to the officer who picked her up and drove her to a state hospital that Kennedy would be killed in Dallas shortly. (ibid, p. 78) When this turned out to be true, the officer returned to her and got more details.

    There is no evidence the Commission ever investigated Cheramie. But Jim Garrison did. He got identifications of Cheramie’s companions. They turned out to be Sergio Arcacha Smith and CIA operative Emilio Santana.

    57. The Commission’s investigation of Oswald in Mexico City was so skimpy as to be negligent.

    Declassified in 1996, this was called the Slawson-Coleman report, named after staff attorneys David Slawson and William Coleman. The man who coordinated with the Commission about their visit to Mexico City was CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 1, p. 14) Helms advised that every step they took in Mexico that Slawson and Coleman deal “on the spot with the CIA representative.” (ibid) Consequently, this 37-page report does not mention Anne Goodpasture, or the Tarasoffs. Goodpasture has become an incredibly important figure today. Because she controlled the tapes and photo surveillance files from the Cuban and Russian consulates for suspect David Phillips. The Tarasoffs were the married couple that did the Russian translations from the surveillance tapes. Further, the Commission never interviewed Silvia Duran, the receptionist in the Cuban embassy who actually spent the most time with Oswald; or whoever this person was.

    Why do I say that? Because the Slawson/Coleman report never reveals the following information: 1.) Duran talked to an “Oswald” who was short and blonde, not the real Oswald (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 349) 2.) The record says Oswald visited the embassies a total of five times. There should be ten pictures the CIA took of him entering and exiting the buildings. There are none. 3.) The FBI heard tapes the CIA said were of Oswald. The agents interviewing Oswald in detention said the man they talked to was not the man on the tapes. (ibid, p. 357) Which poses the question: was Oswald in Mexico City?

    Maybe, but maybe not. Either way, it is doubtful he did the things the Commission said he did. In fact, the HSCA prepared two perjury indictments for the Justice Department to serve on this issue. One was for Phillips and one for Goodpasture. The Mexico City report issued by the HSCA, authored by Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez; which was 400 pages long– enumerates numerous lies told to the Committee by those two. And it strongly indicates someone was manipulating the surveillance record. If that is so, then one has to wonder if it was a coincidence that this was done to the man who would be accused of killing Kennedy in advance of the assassination.

    58. The chief witnesses against Oswald were Ruth and Michael Paine.

    As Walt Brown notes in his book, The Warren Omission, the Paines were in the witness chair on a combined nine days. In total, they were asked well over 6,000 questions. In fact, Ruth was asked the most questions of any single witness. (See Brown, pgs. 262-63) Yet, except for Senator Richard Russell, not one commissioner ever posed any queries as to who they really were, what they did in this case, and why the Commission used them so extensively. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 195) But there is a telltale piece of evidence about all that. It appears that Allen Dulles solicited old friends of his from the Eastern Establishment to give the couple public endorsements as early as December of 1963; which was well before any witnesses were called, Or the Commission’s case took shape. (ibid)

    But Dulles went even further about this connection. In private, he commented that the JFK researchers “would have had a field day if they had known…he had actually been in Dallas three weeks before the murder…and that one of Mary Bancroft’s childhood friends had turned out to be a landlady for Marina Oswald.” (ibid, p. 198) The Mary Bancroft Dulles was referring to had been an OSS agent he had run during World War II. Mary was a lifelong friend with Ruth Forbes, Michael Paine’s mother.

    To make a long story short, both Ruth and Michael Paine came from family backgrounds that are intertwined with the power elite and the CIA. For instance, Ruth’s sister, Sylvia Hoke worked for the Agency in 1963, a fact the CIA and Ruth tried to keep from Jim Garrison. Sylvia’s husband worked for the Agency for International Development, which was closely affiliated with the Agency. Later in life, Ruth admitted to a friend her father worked for the CIA also. And during the Contra war in Nicaragua, many American Sandinista sympathizers on the scene saw Ruth’s activities there as being CIA sponsored. (ibid, pgs. 197, 199) There is also evidence that a man fitting the description of Michael Paine was at a restaurant adjacent to SMU trying to sniff out students who were sympathetic to Castro. Further, there were early reports that Dallas deputy Sheriff Buddy Walthers, in his search of the Paine household, discovered several “metal filing cabinets full of letter, maps, records, and index cards, with names of pro-Castro sympathizers.” (ibid, p. 198) There is also evidence that the Paines played a role in manufacturing the case against Oswald. For instance, they claimed the Minox spy camera found in Oswald’s belongings really belonged to Michael. (ibid, p. 207.) For a survey of the case against the Paines see, James DiEugenio’s Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pgs. 155-56, 194-208. (Also, click here for a visual essay). This declassified record makes the Paines appear fishier than an aquarium.

    59. There is no mention of Carl Mather of Collins Radio in the Warren Report.

    Carl Mather and his wife were good friends with Officer Tippit and his wife Marie. In fact, they went over to the Tippit home to console Marie at about 3:30 PM. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 527) What makes that so interesting is what happened about 2 hours earlier.

    In Oak Cliff, on Davis Street horns were blaring and police cars moving within an hour of the assassination due to the murder of Tippit in that area. A veteran auto mechanic named T. F. White saw a man in a car looking suspicious, like he was trying to hide himself. This was in the parking lot of the El Chico Restaurant across the street from his auto garage. Which was about six blocks from the scene of the Tippit murder. White went over to the car and got a better look at the man and took down the license plate. When he got home that night and watched TV, he told his wife that the man in the car was Oswald. (ibid, p. 526)

    When reporter Wes Wise heard about the story, he got the license plate number checked out. It belonged to Carl Mather. Thus began the mystery of how either Oswald, or a double, got in a car after the assassination with a license plate belonging to Tippit’s friend Mather. To make it worse, Mather worked for a CIA related company called Collins Radio. Collins did work for the White House, had contracts in Vietnam and worked with Cuban exiles on ships used in raids on Castro’s Cuba. (ibid, pgs. 527-28)

    That the Warren Report does not mention this pregnant lead is incredible.

    60. The Warren Report says that Jack Ruby had no significant connections to organized crime figures.

    Since they did not know about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, maybe the Commission did not think Santo Trafficante was significant. But Trafficante was one of the three mobsters the CIA contacted in order to do away with Fidel Castro (the other two were John Roselli and Sam Giancana.) There were reliable reports, from more than one source, that Ruby visited Trafficante while he was imprisoned by Castro at Tresconia prison in late 1959. One eyewitness even said that he saw Ruby serving the mobster a meal. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, pgs. 455-56)

    Another witness said that on this trip to Cuba, Ruby was also seen with Lewis McWillie. McWillie was a former manager of Trafficante’s gambling casinos in Havana. Ruby actually shipped handguns to McWillie in Cuba. By all accounts Ruby idolized McWillie; and would do almost anything for him. (ibid, p. 272)

    61. Officer Patrick Dean lied about how Ruby could have gotten into the city hall basement on Sunday November 24th to kill Oswald.

    Dean was in charge of security for the transfer of Oswald that day. He told Burt Griffin of the Commission that Ruby would have needed a key to get into a door that ran along the alleyway behind the building. Griffin suspected Dean was lying about this point. Griffin wrote a memo saying he had reason to think that Ruby did not come down the Main Street ramp. But Dean was urging Ruby to say this as a part of a cover up. Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin would not back Griffin on this and succumbed to pressure out of Dallas, especially from DA Henry Wade. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 205-06)

    It turned out that Dean was lying on this point. When the HSCA investigated this issue they found out that Ruby did not need a key to enter that door. They further found out that Dean flunked his polygraph test administered by the Dallas Police; even though he wrote his own questions! When the HSCA went looking for this test, it was nowhere to be found. (ibid, p. 205)

    62. The FBI falsified Jack Ruby’s polygraph test.

    The HSCA appointed a panel of polygraph experts to examine the records of Jack Ruby’s lie detector test for the Warren Commission. This was done by an FBI expert named Bell Herndon. The Commission accepted Herndon’s verdict that Ruby had passed the test. The HSCA panel did not. In fact, they exposed the test as being so faulty as to be about worthless. The panel said that Herndon violated at least ten basic protocols of polygraph technique. These ranged from having too many people in the room; which would cause diversions and false readings; to asking way too many questions. There were over 100; which is about six times as many as there should have been. (ibid, p. 244)

    This was crucial. Because as the panel explained, liars become immune to showing physiological stimuli if questioned for too long. In other words, the subject could lie and get away with it. Herndon also confused the types of questions; relevant, irrelevant, and control questions; so that it was hard to arrange a chart based on accurate readings. (ibid)

    Finally, Herndon completely altered the proper methods of using the Galvanic Skin Response machine (GSR). He started it at a low point of only 25% capacity, and then lowered it. The panel said the machine should never have been set that low. But it should have been raised, not lowered, later. (ibid, p. 245) This is interesting because when Ruby was asked, “Did you assist Oswald in the assassination?”; to which he replied in the negative; it registered the largest GSR reaction in the first test series. (ibid, pgs. 245-46)

    63. The Dallas Police hid the best witness to the killing of Oswald by Ruby.

    Sgt. Don Flusche was never examined by the Warren Commission. There are indications that the DPD did not want the Commission to know about him. (ibid, p, 204) Flusche was in a perfect position to watch the ramp from Main Street. He had parked his car across the street and was leaning on it during the entire episode of Ruby shooting Oswald. Further, he knew Ruby. He told HSCA investigator Jack Moriarty that “There was no doubt in his mind that Ruby did not walk down the ramp and further did not walk down Main Street anywhere near the Ramp.” (ibid, p. 203)

    Conclusion

    Much of the above evidence was kept from the Commission. Which shows how weak and controlled the whole exercise was. Without independent investigators, the Commission was reliant on the good will of bodies like the FBI and Dallas Police; who both had much to hide in regards to the murders of Kennedy, Tippit and Oswald.

    But the clear outlines of a conspiratorial design is obvious in the evidence above. One in which Oswald is unconsciously manipulated by those around him in New Orleans and Mexico City e.g. Ferrie and Phillips. He then returns to Dallas where he and his wife are in the clutches of their false friends, Ruth and Michael Paine. Kennedy is killed, and the CIA brings in its old ally the Mafia. McWillie and Trafficante find the perfect man, one with prolific ties to the police, to polish off Oswald before he can talk.

    Is this what happened? We don’t know that for sure since this scenario was never investigated at the time. But we know today that it is perfectly plausible; much more so than the wild fantasy proposed in the Warren Report.

    We will stop at 63 pieces of evidence, for two reasons. First that is ten more than Vincent Bugliosi brought up in Reclaiming History to indict Oswald. And ours are much more solid and convincing than his. Second, it’s the year Kennedy was killed. And as many studies have shown e.g. Larry Sabato’s in The Kennedy Half Century; the vast majority of Americans felt that something went awry with America after Kennedy’s murder.

    We agree. So although we could easily go to one hundred, 63 is a good number to stop at.

  • Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World

    The historiography of the presidency of John F. Kennedy has taken a notable curve over the five decades since his passing. In the wake of his assassination, from about 1965 to 1973, there were a number of books published from former members of his White House staff. For example Ted Sorenson’s Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days were released in 1965. Pierre Salinger published With Kennedy in 1966. Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers published Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye in 1973. These books all had value, and still are useful books. But the problem with them as history is that they are not, in the best sense, scholarly works. By and large they are memoirs. None of them have bibliographies in any sense. And none of them, except Schlesinger’s book is annotated – and even that is very sparse. Consequently, if one wanted to pen a book – for whatever reason – that was anti-Kennedy, one could dismiss these works as being non-objective books which, because of their personal ties to the president, paint a one-sided view of the man.

    Well, the anti-Kennedy movement did come. And with a vengeance. As I noted in my essay, The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy, it began right after the revelations of the Church Committee. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pgs. 324-73) That committee implicated Dwight Eisenhower and Allen Dulles in at least one attempted assassination plot of a foreign leader. But it could not do the same with President Kennedy. Although it did produce plenty of evidence that the CIA on its own, and with help from the Mafia, did try and kill Fidel Castro.

    As a reaction to this verdict, which was perceived by many on the right to be partisan – even though it was partly based on the CIA’s own Inspector General Report – there began to be an effort to reverse the image of Kennedy portrayed in these previous insider books. And also an attempt to reverse the verdict of the Church Committee: that somehow Kennedy was actually involved in assassination plots. In that essay, I mentioned four books published from 1976 onward in this vein. The first was The Search for JFK by Joan and Clay Blair and in 1984, the late John Davis published The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster. The Blair book concentrated on Kennedy from his youth until he decided to run for congress. The Davis book went into his presidency, and used an array of questionable witnesses and twisted testimony to implicate him in the Castro plots. Also in 1984, those reformed leftists Davis Horowitz and Peter Collier published an equally lopsided and untrustworthy volume called The Kennedys: An American Drama. Collier and Horowitz used people like Tim Leary and Priscilla Johnson to portray Kennedy as nothing more than an empty headed playboy upon his arrival in the White House.

    In 1991, Thomas Reeves published A Question of Character, the worst of the four. Reeves did almost no original research. He just crammed as much of the anti-Kennedy literature he could between the covers of his book. Even though he was a Ph. D. in history, he used some of the most specious sources one could imagine, for example John Davis on the Castro plots and Kitty Kelley and People Weekly on the likes of Judith Exner. As I pointed out in my essay, Reeves had an agenda. And the agenda did not include writing good history. Because I exposed why any real historian, if he was looking, should have seen through the falsities in both Davis and Exner. Reeves was not looking.

    But already in 1983 there had begun to be a twist in the curve. Richard Mahoney published his landmark book JFK: Ordeal in Africa. This book could not be dismissed as an insider memoir because Mahoney had spent about a year at the Kennedy Library going through all they had on the immense Congo crisis. He then produced a book that told us more about the origins and design of Kennedy’s foreign policy than any previous tome. Then in 1991, UCLA historian Irving Bernstein published Promises Kept, a reassessment of President Kennedy’s domestic policies dealing primarily with the economy and civil rights. In 1992, John Newman published JFK and Vietnam, which was the most detailed and convincing book written to that time – and perhaps since – on Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam. In 1994, Professor Donald Gibson published Battling Wall Street, a volume dedicated almost exclusively to an examination of Kennedy’s economic policies at home and abroad, e.g. The Alliance for Progress.

    The impact of these four books was considerable. They began to turn the tide. Because, unlike the earlier books, these works were scholarly in approach and tone. They were filled with footnotes and sources and therefore could not be easily dismissed. And much of the footnoting was to primary sources, which had just recently been declassified. In the light of this impact, other authors now began to mine this field. One which authors like Davis, Reeves and Sy Hersh had done all they could to muddy the waters about. We therefore got valuable work on the Kennedy presidency by authors like David Kaiser, Jim Douglass, James Blight, David Talbot and Gordon Goldstein. By and large, what these books prove is that the first wave of authors, if scanty in their sourcing, were correct in their judgment. The Kennedy presidency really was a break from what had preceded it. And what came after it.

    In the last two years, we have seen the arrival of two books that go even further in that regard. They deal with a rarified but important subject: Kennedy’s approach to, and his dealings with the Third World. First there was Betting on the Africans by Philip Muehlenbeck. This was an acute and comprehensive look at Kennedy’s foreign policy in Africa. That book is now out in paperback and it is well worth purchasing. (See my review)

    After Muehlenbeck’s work, we now have Robert Rakove’s book on a similar subject. It is entitled Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World. The Rakove book is a good complement to Muehlenbeck’s for two reasons. First, although the book does not deal as extensively with Africa as Muehlenbeck, Rakove does deal with other countries outside of Africa e.g. India, and Indonesia. Secondly, Rakove goes into events well beyond Kennedy’s death, which helped reverse his Third World policies, e.g. Nixon’s famous Bohemian Grove speech of 1967.

    II

    Rakove begins his book on November 23, 1963. Depicting a state of official mourning in Cairo, he quotes Anwar El Sadat as saying Kennedy was the first American president who understood the Afro-Asian world. He then shifts the scene to India. There, Nehru addressed a special session of congress. He said that with Kennedy’s murder, a crime against humanity had been enacted. Not just against the American people but also, because of Kennedy’s sweeping and humane vision of the world, the crime had been committed against all mankind. In Jakarta, Sukarno delivered a heartfelt eulogy and ordered all flags lowered to half-mast.

    Rakove then gets to the point of his book. He notes that just one year later, angry mobs attacked the American libraries in both Egypt and Indonesia. And President Johnson was maligned in no uncertain terms by all three leaders. Three years after that, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the charismatic leader of Egypt actually severed relations with the United States over Johnson’s break with Kennedy’s policy in the Middle East, which clearly favored Israel in the Six-Day War. These personal attacks in Africa and Asia were to become a recurrent event as time went on. Culminating, of course, with the physical attacks on the USA in September of 2001.

    Rakove notes that, as an historical marker, the non-aligned movement began in 1955. This was the group of Third World countries who did not want to commit to either the east or west, and therefore become pawns in the Cold War. The man given credit for the first organizational meeting was Achmed Sukarno. His foreign minister organized that meeting, and it was held in Bandung, Indonesia.

    One reason Sukarno did this was because neither he, nor many other Third World leaders, had any trust in Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (Rakove, p. 3) These leaders looked askance at Dulles’ penchant of ringing the USSR with American inspired regional alliances to stop the spread of communism. Nehru called this “a wrong approach, a dangerous approach, and a harmful approach.” (ibid, p. 5) Dulles’ Manichean view of the world inevitably created conflicts in three areas: 1.) the Middle East 2.) Southeast Asia, and 3.) sub-Sahara Africa. For instance, Nasser clearly objected to the creation of the Bagdad Pact in 1955, which included Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and the United Kingdom. (p. 6) Dulles’ State Department was so much enamored of the “with us or against us” Cold War mentality that it labeled the growth of the non-aligned movement as “one of the most dangerous political trends of the fifties.” (ibid, p. 6) In fact, Dulles even contemplated staging a shadow Bandung Conference with conservative, sympathetic American allied nations at the conference. (p. 9) In fact, at a speech in Iowa in 1956, Dulles actually spoke aloud about the false pretense of a nation pretending to be neutral. In fact, he said his alliance system had eliminated that possibility. So much for the idea of a non-aligned country steering clear of the Cold War. (p. 10) Dulles was so reviled in the non-aligned world that, after he died, he became known as the man who made their foreign policy immoral.

    Like Muehlenbeck, Rakove begins with some choices made by Eisenhower and Dulles that clearly connote that they were not for the revolution in nationalism that was taking place in Africa and Asia at the time. Quite aptly, Rakove mentions Dulles pulling out of the Aswan Dam deal in Egypt and making Nasser go to the Russians for financing of the project. In the dispute between India and Portugal over the Indian Goa exclaves, the administration seemed to favor Portugal. (p. 14) And in Indonesia, Dulles tended to ignore the dispute between the Netherlands and Sukarno over the valuable island territory of West Irian. In fact, privately he was opposed to turning over the territory to Indonesia, and twice he refused to commandeer negotiations between the two countries. (p. 15) Rakove then describes how when Sukarno seemed to get too close to the Soviets, the Dulles brothers began to plan a coup against him.

    In continuing his summary of the Eisenhower-Dulles policy in the Third World, Rakove states that in Southeast Asia, Eisenhower wanted to assume control over the fallen French Empire in Indochina. (p. 16) Rakove adds that John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, the CIA Director, were also opposed to neutral governments in Burma, Laos and Cambodia.

    Turning to Africa, Rakove states that Eisenhower had not even set up a State Department section dealing with African affairs until 1958. In a revealing aside, he writes that, before that time, African policy was run out of the European Bureau. (p. 18) Dulles was quite explicit about how wealthy certain areas of Africa were in mineral resources. He then added that the West would be in serious trouble if Africa were lost to the Free World.

    Like Muehlenbeck, Rakove notes that when France ostensibly left Africa, DeGaulle tried to keep as much control and influence as he could over Francophone Africa. Only Sekou Toure of Guinea did not accept DeGaulle’s terms for aid in order to stay part of what was in essence a commonwealth. Therefore, France tried to isolate his country. Dulles went along with this by not recognizing its independence at first. (p. 19) He did later only when communist countries agreed to aid the country.

    III

    From here, Rakove now segues into the giant Congo crisis. As I have said several times, no author I know of did a better job of describing that struggle and America’s role in it than Richard Mahoney in his classic JFK: Ordeal in Africa. At this stage of his book, Rakove gives us a decent enough precis of that titanic struggle, up to the murder of Patrice Lumumba. He uses this as a mirror to show how angry most of the African leaders of the time were about, as with France, Belgium’s duplicity in announcing a withdrawal, but using that withdrawal to keep control of their former colony by other imperial means instead of direct colonization. Rakove writes that whatever Eisenhower and Dulles said in public about being neutral in the Congo struggle, their actions clearly betrayed their siding with Belgium against revolutionary leader Patrice Lumumba. (p. 21) Two other examples of this favoritism toward colonialism were the CIA’s role in the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, and the attempt to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia. In these three cases, Eisenhower and Dulles clearly sided with regressive forces as opposed to the nationalists who wanted to be independent.

    In the face of all this, and also the USA’s intervention in Lebanon in 1958, the USSR now began to make headway in the Third World. Rakove draws the above as background to what he is about to detail as a not so quiet revolution in foreign policy by President Kennedy. The word he will use to describe it is “engagement”.

    In fact, Rakove begins the second chapter of his book with a promise by president-elect John F. Kennedy. This promise made explicit that JFK was going to break with the Eisenhower/Dulles vision of the Third World. Kennedy said that he would not support substituting a new kind of tyranny for the former shackles of colonialism. But further he said he would not expect these new states to support America’s view of the world in each and every instance; but he would expect them to support their own freedom. (p. 29) These comments, in direct opposition to what Dulles had stated, set the tone for the split that will now come from Kennedy versus Eisenhower and Dulles. To show just how big a divide Kennedy would launch, Rakove notes that, even Adlai Stevenson, the liberal icon of the Democratic Party, called Kennedy’s memorable 1957 speech on the French/Algerian civil war “a great mistake”. (p. 32) But today, this speech is seen as the baseline for JFK’s beliefs about colonial conflict and the state of the emerging Third World. And it was these beliefs that would now be set into action by what Rakove calls the policy of engagement. A revolutionary policy that the author says academia has not really recognized.

    Rakove points out India as an example of a key state in the non-aligned world. Kennedy thought he could use India as a broker state to communicate with other non-aligned nations from Casablanca to Jakarta. Kennedy felt this way at least since 1958. For at that time, with Sen. John Sherman Cooper – a former ambassador to India – he co-sponsored the Kennedy-Cooper resolution, which featured expanded aid to India. (p. 33) But in addition to India, upon his inauguration, Kennedy wanted to develop better relations with both Nasser of Egypt and Sukarno of Indonesia.

    The author now goes into the reason d’etre for engagement. Kennedy felt that the “get tough” attitude that Foster Dulles had displayed with these countries had been, quite often, counter-productive. To the point where it had provided openings for the Soviets or Chinese to gain a competitive advantage. (p. 40)

    Rakove then makes an interesting distinction in the different attitudes toward engagement in the Kennedy administration. He points out one group of policy-makers who he calls idealists, that is men who acted as they did out of sheer fairness and charity over past Western crimes in the Third World. Rakove includes here Chester Bowles, African supervisor Mennen Williams and John K. Galbraith. Then he delineates a second group of men who he calls realists. These are policy-makers who acted as they did more out of a pragmatic view of the world. That is, if the USA repeated the excesses of Dulles/Eisenhower, then the USSR and China would make more inroads in the Third World. Rakove lists in this group Walt Rostow, George Ball and NSC staffer Robert Komer.

    At this point, the author notes the central case of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and his relations with first Kennedy and then Johnson. (p. 52) Rakove writes that Kennedy and Rusk only had the barest of formal relationships. For instance, JFK often called him “Mr. Secretary”. There was none of the personal bonding between the two that Kennedy had with say Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Galbraith or even George Ball. And, as others have noted, Rusk very likely would have been replaced in a second Kennedy term. He contrasts this with the warmer relations that Rusk had with Lyndon Johnson, who decided to keep Rusk on throughout his presidency. And unlike Ball, McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. Rusk endured the entire build up of forces in South Vietnam, something Kennedy almost certainly would not have done. But Rakove also notes, Rusk was a key reason that Kennedy’s policy of engagement wavered and then died under President Johnson. For in Kennedy’s outreach to the Third World, Rusk was only following orders. He had no internal beliefs in the policy to parallel Kennedy’s. Therefore, when Johnson eventually dropped engagement, Rusk offered no real resistance.

    But to further delineate what happened after Kennedy’s murder, Rakove outlines the working relationship between Foster Dulles and Johnson in the fifties. As Senate Majority Leader, LBJ had a close working relationship with the former Secretary of State. In fact, when Dulles was in the hospital dying of cancer, Johnson had sent him flowers and Dulles thanked Johnson for his many kindnesses and concern for his condition. (p. 55)

    In addition to this, Rakove notes – as many others have – that Kennedy’s management style differed from Johnson’s. Kennedy encouraged open debate and the exchange of contrary ideas. To put it mildly, Johnson did not. Therefore, in relation to the non-aligned world, Kennedy’s successor tended to ignore the input of Williams, Bowles and Stevenson. (p. 58) For instance, when Stevenson once tried to advise Johnson on his China policy, LBJ told him that is not what he was paid for. That was what Rusk was paid for. (p. 59) It was this difference in style, plus Johnson’s view of foreign aid as granting America rights of return on investment, plus the soaring escalation in Vietnam, which eventually managed to kill Kennedy’s engagement policy

    IV

    Rakove traces the beginnings of the formal engagement policy to a State Department paper issued in May of 1961. This paper recommended cooperation with neutralist countries, and also the necessity of countering Nikita Khrushchev’s January, 1961 appeal of Russian aid for wars of national liberation. (p. 166) Also, Kennedy drafted a message supporting the 1961 Belgrade Conference of non-aligned nations. This contrasts with Dulles’ strategy, which contemplated staging a rival conference of American-friendly states. (p. 76) After the Belgrade Conference, Kennedy began to direct attention to non-aligned states through the appointment of active and knowledgeable ambassadors like Galbraith in India and John Badeau in Egypt. (p. 83) Some of these men, like Galbraith, were personal friends of JFK.

    In May of 1961, Kennedy sent a letter to the leaders of the Arab world asking for their help in seeking a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. (p. 85) Almost every reply was belligerent, especially that of Saudi Arabia. The exception was the one by Nasser of Egypt. Kennedy used that reply to begin a correspondence with the pan Arab leader. This friendship managed to tone down Nasser’s anti-American and anti-Israeli invective while JFK was president. Kennedy also began to use foreign aid, especially food aid packages, to nations like Egypt, India and Indonesia in order to further relationships in the non-aligned world.

    But beyond these matters, it was Kennedy’s policies in places like Congo, Portuguese Africa, and West Irian that really brought him the appreciation and sympathy of the leaders of the non-aligned nations. These actions symbolized a clean break from the “with us or against us” attitude of John Foster Dulles. And it therefore acknowledged the desire of the non-aligned countries to go their own way with confidence. Knowing that the new president would understand that independence from Washington’s dictates did not mean automatic alliance with the USSR. In fact, in some cases, as with William Attwood’s posting to Guinea, Kennedy’s policies either lessened or even negated growing relationships in the Third World with the USSR. (pgs. 89-91)

    By 1963, with Kennedy’s help to India during a Chinese incursion, Rakove says engagement was at its apogee. (p. 92) Especially in the wake of the Russian attempt to make Cuba a forward base for its atomic weapons. But according to the author, in 1963, the policy effectiveness began to wind down. Rakove’s opinion on this is that with Kennedy occupied with the big issues of Berlin, Vietnam and Cuba, a dispute broke out that was actually three sided. It was between the previously noted idealist faction, the realist faction, and on the third side Dean Rusk. Who, according to Rakove, never really had his heart in the policy. (pgs. 95-96)

    But there were also external forces at work. As Rakove says, by 1963, the White House was getting it from both sides on this issue. From the Europeans for siding with the Third World, and from the non-aligned countries for not making anti-colonialism a clearly demarcated American policy. Concerning the former, both England and France advised Kennedy not to join in the UN military solution to the Congo crisis. (p. 104) JFK did so anyway. On the other side, India wondered why the USA did not formally back its military attempt to expel Portugal from Goa. Actually, the American ambassador tried to talk Nehru out of taking military action there. And, in fact, Adlai Stevenson opposed the Indian action in the United Nations. (pgs. 109-110)

    Rakove now points out a third element that began to slow down the policy of engagement. Because Kennedy’s policy was now so out there, that it began to attract opposition from congress. Even from so-called liberal Democrats like Stuart Symington. (p. 110) And finally, struggles like the Congo and the West Irian dispute in Indonesia were so difficult and drawn out that they sapped the energy and the will of the White House to do more. The West Irian dispute necessitated Kennedy sending his brother Robert to The Hague for personal diplomacy with the colonialists.

    According to the author, these factors set the stage for the eclipse of the engagement policy in 1964, under the stewardship of Johnson and Rusk.

    V

    To Rakove, a key point in the collapse of engagement was the change in policy under LBJ in Congo. (p. 128) After the death of Dag Hammarskjold, and under the influence of ambassador Edmund Gullion, Kennedy had gotten personally involved in leading the effort to keep the Congo intact. Thereby stopping the European attempt to split off the rich Katanga province and precluding a replacement of colonialism by European imperialism. The high point of this policy was Kennedy’s backing of a UN military mission in 1963 to prevent the succession of Katanga by Moise Tshombe. But in the fall of 1963, a leftist rebellion against Kennedy’s chosen successor to Lumumba, labor leader and Lumumba colleague, Cyrille Adoula, began in Stanleyville. Kennedy wanted to use special forces commandoes under the leadership of Colonel Michael Greene to train Adoula’s army, the ANC. But after Kennedy’s murder, this whole situation went completely awry.

    The Pentagon did not want to back Adoula. They favored army chief Joseph Mobutu, a staunch anti-communist who was much friendlier with the Europeans than Lumumba or Adoula. They deliberately stalled Greene while Kennedy was alive. After his death, the hardliners at the Pentagon now took over. Exhausted and sensing a power shift after Kennedy’s death, Adoula resigned in July of 1964. President Kasavubu appointed Moise Tshombe in his place. (p. 128) Tshombe pulled out all the stops in putting down the Stanleyville rebellion. Including bringing in mercenaries from the whites controlled state of Rhodesia. When leftists kidnapped Belgians citizens and American diplomats, Johnson now reversed Kennedy’s policy and sided with Belgium. American aircraft flown by CIA backed Cuban exiles now begin a massive air bombardment around Stanleyville. This led to a firestorm of criticism from the non-aligned states in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. (p. 130) Which is why Rakove calls the Stanleyville operation a milestone in the turning around of America’s image in the Third World from Kennedy to Johnson and then Nixon. In fact, Rakove notes that the Stanleyville incursion sparked even more criticism of the USA than did the death of Lumumba. As Rakove notes, with the retaliation by Johnson over the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the United States was now seen by many of the non-aligned countries as becoming an imperial power. (p. 134)

    Which leads to another distinction between Johnson and Kennedy. Kennedy risked relations with Europe in order to correct injustices in the Third World. And at times, he refused to go along with European allies on matters of principle outside colonial disputes e.g. the Skybolt affair with England, his refusal to give atomic weapons to Bonn. Johnson had little patience or appetite for these kinds of disputes. He was very conscious of the age-old American alliance with the United Kingdom.(p. 136) And in fact, very soon after the transition, Komer saw that LBJ would not be as sympathetic to the Third World as JFK was. For instance, Kennedy had always treated Nkrumah with respect. But now LBJ began to favor the more conservative African states who considered Nkrumah wild and unpredictable, or even worse. (p. 144) Nkrumah understood what was happening and he began to turn on the Europeans, for example, the British.

    The same thing happened between Johnson and Sukarno. Sukarno was against the formation of the British union of Malaysia. This included the countries of Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore. England needed the USA to stop supporting Sukarno in order to establish Malaysia. It was created in September of 1963. England brought much pressure on JFK to back Malaysia and ignore Sukarno’s protests. (p. 148) In fact, when Sukarno sent one of his top generals to visit Kennedy that fall, Kennedy was set to tell him that he still backed Sukarno and considered the Malaysia dispute only a temporary diversion. (p. 149) But General Nasution arrived not to meet Kennedy, but as Sukarno’s emissary to his funeral. But during their meeting, LBJ told Nasution he would continue Kennedy’s policies in regards to Indonesia.

    As Rakove points out, in light of what was about to happen, it is hard to believe that Johnson was doing anything but dissimulating with Nasution. For Johnson did not sign the aid bill that Kennedy was about to sign, which was still on the president’s desk. He now began to freeze out Sukarno and termed him a bully in private. And since Johnson favored England in the Malaysia dispute, he felt that if he talked to Sukarno it would show a sign of weakness. (p. 149) This played into the hands of the anti-Sukarno lobby in congress, which was growing fast. Kennedy had a state visit to Indonesia scheduled at the time of his death. Johnson never fulfilled that promise and never invited Sukarno to Washington. As Rakove notes, one reason LBJ changed Kennedy’s policy was in response to growing conflicts in Vietnam. He perceived Sukarno as too far left and to beholden to the PKI, the communist party in Indonesia. Kennedy’s attitude in this regard was the contrary. He was not afraid of Sukarno’s backing because he knew he was primarily a nationalist. But further if America froze Sukarno out, this would gravitate him to the communists.

    Which is what happened. Sukarno was now driven into the arms of the Chinese. And the USSR now sold MIG-21’s to Sukarno. Sukarno now recognized North Vietnam, and condemned growing aid by Johnson to Saigon. By late 1964, Sukarno was in an open alliance with Bejing. (p. 151)

    The same pattern occurred in Egypt. Three factors were at work that ended up poisoning the constructive work Kennedy had done with Nasser. First, Johnson was much more openly sympathetic to Israel than Kennedy was in the Israeli-Arab dispute. Second, unlike JFK, Johnson leaned toward the more conservative Arab states in the region, like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iran. Third, LBJ was not sympathetic toward Nasser’s ambition to lead the non-aligned movement. (p. 150) As Rakove points out, Kennedy’s moves toward friendly relations with Nasser were looked upon with a jaundiced eye by Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In the civil war in Yemen, Kennedy took Nasser’s side with the nationalist rebels versus the monarchy. He even tried to mediate the dispute. But England now openly sided with the monarchists and began to refer to Nasser as an Arab Hitler. (p. 156)

    By 1964, Nasser decided that the United States was about to shift policy in the Middle East in favor of Israel. (p. 159) In anticipation of this, he decided to warm up to the Russians and invited Nikita Khrushchev to visit. His growing violent rhetoric inspired students to attack the US Embassy in Cairo. And seeing where the United States was headed in Congo, he demanded all American influence out of that country.

    Finally, Rakove deals with the India/Pakistan dispute. Most commentators would say that Kennedy favored India. And again, the British did not like the fact that he did so. (p. 165) Now Johnson again began to reverse Kennedy’s policy in the area toward Pakistan. Predictably, India now began to buy arms from the Soviets.

    As Rakove writes, by 1964, the image of the USA abroad was literally in flames. US libraries in Cairo and Jakarta were burned. That is how fast the perception circulated that Johnson was breaking with Kennedy.

    VI

    As the author notes, Kennedy was very active in extending aid packages to Third World countries. Some of these programs he initiated, some he used to a unique and unprecedented degree: Alliance for Progress, Food for Peace, the Peace Corps. There were two views of foreign aid. One view said it should be used to help the economies of the undeveloped world grow and prosper. Therefore, if expensive, large-scale programs were necessary, Kennedy should go to congress and ask for the money. Which he did.

    The second view of foreign aid was that it was really more like an insurance policy. If the USA gave someone aid, we expected loyalty back. The battle over these two views gained momentum as Kennedy took more and more risks with his engagement policy. (p. 180) As conflicts grew in places like Congo, Goa, Yemen, and Malaysia, Kennedy’s opponents began to make the argument that the lowering of foreign aid should be a way of punishing non aligned countries who would not heed Washington’s wishes. And the fact that Kennedy even extended aid to Tito of Yugoslavia, who was part of the Communist Bloc, made his program more vulnerable. (p. 182)

    Again, men in his own party now challenged Kennedy. For instance, Democratic senator Bill Proxmire wanted to ban all foreign aid to communist countries. Stuart Symington opposed aid to India for construction of a steel mill. He cited the words of the Shah of Iran, a Kennedy nemesis, “No country could afford to stay neutral in the Cold War.” (p. 184) Ernest Gruening opposed aid to Nasser. (p. 189) So in his last year, Kennedy’s request for a large foreign aid package of nearly 5 billion was gradually whittled down while he was alive to about 4 billion. But when Johnson took office, it drooped even more, down to 3 billion. (p. 190) Simply because Johnson looked at the program through the second lens, as a way of rewarding friends and punishing perceived enemies. And then after this, Johnson never made the high requests for foreign aid that JFK did. As a result of this change in policy, the USA has little leverage in places like Egypt and Indonesia. And Rakove notes that by 1966, the whole Kennedy experiment with engagement was finished. Even Pakistan had moved closer to China, and India to the USSR. And as the Vietnam War now began to spin out of control, and non-aligned countries began to criticize the bombing program, Johnson began to cut even more aid programs to his critics. In fact, some countries now swore off any US aid e.g. Egypt and India. (p. 207-08) In fact Johnson actually created the Perkins Committee on foreign aid to explicitly recommend aid for political ends. (p. 212)

    Near the end of the book, Rakove tries to find specific reasons for the cessation of engagement. He goes overboard when he says that the White House encouraged the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. As both John Newman, and Jim Douglass have shown, the overthrow of Diem was a plot manufactured by a cabal in the State Department made up of Averill Harriman, Roger Hilsman and Mike Forrestal. They were aided and abetted in Vietnam by Henry Cabot Lodge and Lucien Conein. (See John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, pgs. 345-56; James W. Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable pgs. 163-167)

    Rakove gets more realistic when he writes that Johnson was never as interested in Third Word problems as Kennedy was. (p. 217) Some, like Komer, tried to tell Johnson what was at stake if Kennedy’s policy was not upheld and continued after his death. But it was no use. Johnson did not continue with state visits at the pace Kennedy had. He did not exchange correspondence as Kennedy did. And he did not have nearly the personal charm or warmth towards these leaders that Kennedy did. As Rakove writes, “LBJ lacked Kennedy’s intellectual interest in decolonization and his advisors had lost some of their enthusiasm for presidential diplomacy.” (p. 218) As the author notes, Johnson never met with any African non-aligned head of state. In fact, the new president began to meet with representatives of countries who were opposed to the non-aligned world, like Israel and Malaysia. And as the policy changed, Kennedy’s handpicked ambassadors now left their posts, like John Badeau in Egypt. And now the White House tried to actually discourage certain countries from attending the non-aligned meetings. (p. 221)

    Then as three non aligned leaders were disposed of by coups – Ben Bella in Algeria, Sukarno in Indonesia, and Nkrumah in Ghana – Johnson looks at these as bad men getting their comeuppance. Rakove argues that these events encouraged Johnson to escalate even further in Vietnam. (I must point out another point of contention with the author. He argues that the great Indonesia overthrow of 1965 was completely internal. Many others disagree and believe Western intelligence has a role in it beforehand, since it was accurately predicted a year in advance.) And as Johnson senselessly escalated in Southeast Asia, the no aligned leaders now vilified him even more. Which, in turn, made Johnson cut off even more aid programs, which worsened relations. (p. 243)

    In fact, the whole relationship with Egypt collapsed in 1966. Johnson had sold more and more arms to Israel in 1965 and 1966. (p. 246) And Johnson also favored the monarchy in Saudi Arabia over Nasser. When Israeli jets bombed the Egyptian Air Force on June 5, 1967, within 24 hours, Nasser broke relations with the USA. (p. 247) They would stay broken for six years. Two things now happened in the non-aligned movement. It became more Soviet backed. And also more of the members explicitly criticized Johnson’s support for Israel over the Arabs. But further, Johnson did next to nothing to try and get Portugal to dispose of her African colonies. Which was another reversal of Kennedy’s policy.

    As Rakove points out, Johnson’s lack of respect and interest for the Third World continued under Richard Nixon. In a famous speech Nixon gave at eh Bohemian Grove in 1967, Nixon recommended only giving aid to nations allied to America, and noting the rioting against America abroad, he looked askance at Kennedy’s engagement policy and what it had achieved. (pgs. 253-55)

    Near the end, Rakove maps out three turning points which turned around the engagement policy. These were the Stanleyville operation in Congo, Rolling Thunder in Vietnam, and Johnsons’ support for Israel during the Six Day War. (p. 256) But he says the main factor was probably not one of specifics. But it was the difference between the two men, Kennedy and Johnson.

    Overall, this is an intelligent and worthy book on Kennedy’s revolutionary foreign policy. I have made a couple of criticisms , and I could add one more. Rakove writes that Johnson committed to Vietnam because Kennedy had. Which ignores the fact that Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam in 1963 and Johnson knew that and explicitly disagreed with that policy and therefore reversed it. But again, taken as a whole, this is a valuable book. When coupled with Muehlenbeck’s Betting on the Africans, much needed light has now been cast over the specifics of Kennedy’s dealings with the Third World. How these broke with the past, and how LBJ and Nixon then returned them to their previous state. Which made our relations in the undeveloped world much less humane. Or as Bobby Kennedy called it, America had now lost what it should always maintain, “A decent respect for the opinions of Mankind”

  • The Deaths of Two Unsung Heroes: John Judge and Mike Ruppert

    The Deaths of Two Unsung Heroes: John Judge and Mike Ruppert

    In the space of a few days in mid April, two fighters for the truth about America’s recent history were lost to us. John Judge passed away in Washington D.C. and Mike Ruppert passed in Napa, California. It’s appropriate that the two deaths in essence straddled the country. Because in a real sense, John and Mike worked hard to create an alterative paradigm to the MSM’s version of contemporary American history.

    John Judge

    I knew both of these authors and activists for many years. In both a personal way and also in a professional manner. I first met John Judge (left, 11-22-96) at the ASK Symposium in Dallas back in 1991. This was the first of the research conferences, which became annual events when Oliver Stone’s film JFK debuted. John was a working research partner of the late Mae Brussell and he was selling a collection of her best essays there in a pamphlet called the Mae Brussell reader. John and Mae had researched the major assassinations of the sixties at length and in depth. That is, the murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. And since Mae had such a wide variety of interests, John also had a cosmopolitan view of modern American history. John had opinions on things like the Tate-LaBianca murders and the Jonestown tragedy. In all these instances John and Mae came to radically different views of these events than the MSM did.

    Mae’s work was backed up by a huge archive of documents and books and clippings. I know this for a fact since I was one of the very few people who was allowed to utilize this archives. After Mae died in 1988, there ensued a rather unseemly battle over her legacy. This included her collection of broadcast tapes called World Watchers International. These had been made on radio station KAZU FM in Pacific Grove. It also included over 40 file cabinets of newspaper and magazine clippings and documents. In addition to that Mae had about 4000 books, some of which were very hard to come by. Lisa Pease and myself were allowed to go through these materials for a weekend in Santa Barbara when the late bookseller Tom Davis had them in his possession. Although Brussell was caricatured by many in and out of the research field, there were very few in the community that had the wherewithal and stamina to do the very difficult work she did on so many current topics. John benefited from this relationship in much of his work and in his viewpoint of how the importation of the Nazi scientific and spy apparatus through Reinhard Gehlen’s relationship with Allen Dulles and John McCloy impacted the American intelligence community at its inception.

    As I said, at the time I met John and interviewed him for my first book, the first edition of Destiny Betrayed, he really was not a researcher anymore. He first became a public relations liaison for Mae’s work. But that effort was hamstrung over the internecine strife over who Mae actually left her archives and legacy to. John founded the Committee for an Open Archives along with Bill Kelly. That group then joined with CTKA and the AARC to form the Coalition on Political Assassinations, and John became the front person for the COPA. In the late nineties, when that group was formally disbanded, John continued to hold conferences under that banner. In addition to holding seminars on the JFK case, John also did the same in Memphis for the King case, in Los Angeles for the Bobby Kennedy case, and even in New York for the Malcolm X case.

    When the 9-11 attacks happened, John immediately became involved with the family members in trying to get a federal inquiry off the ground. And he also monitored the work of that commission. From 2005 to 2007 he worked as a Special Projects Director for the exceptional Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Two things he did for her was to arrange a 2005 conference of the very best 9-11 researchers for congress to hear, and he helped draft articles of impeachment for George W. Bush.

    One of the researchers who John invited to speak at that McKinney arranged conference was Mike Ruppert. (This conference can be viewed at You Tube under the title, Cynthia McKinney on CSPAN-Report Card 1 of 4.) Which is as it should have been. Mike Ruppert was involved in his alternative journalism career in September of 2001. Mike had been a police detective in Los Angeles for a number of years. While on this job he became romantically involved with a woman who introduced him to the importation of drugs into the US by a combination of the CIA and Halliburton. This led to his resignation from the force. He then got interested in reopening the RFK case. Mike had learned some fascinating things about the RFK cover up while on the force. So he joined forces with the likes of the late Jonn Christian to try and introduce new evidence to the LA Police Commission about that case.

    But when Gary Webbs’s sensational stories in the San Jose Mercury News exploded onto the national agenda in 1996, Ruppert found his moment. When John Deutch visited Los Angeles, Mike confronted him on camera. This was an electric and iconic example of the old adage of “speaking truth to power”. Mike capitalized on this moment by launching his own publication called From the Wilderness. This began as a mailed periodical and then became an online journal. It was one of the very few alternative voices that arose during the so-called Internet Revolution that really was a vibrant and strong media outlet in the tradition of Ramparts and the LA Free Press. (Two others were David Talbot’s Salon and Bob Parry’s Consortium News.)

    There were very few people who were as good as Mike was on the issues of CIA drug dealing. And From the Wilderness helped launch a vibrant speaking tour for Mike. From the Wilderness grew to have a circulation in the tens of thousands. And I eventually wrote for that fine journal. (See here and here.)

    But when the 9-11 attacks happened, Mike pounced on this event like a tiger. As he told me, there just seemed to be too many anomalies about it: the late arriving interceptors, the large stock market manipulation which no one collected on, the many war games in progress that day. Mike had learned from the JFK case. He was not going to concentrate on the physical evidence in 9-11. After all he said, what is more compelling than the Zapruder film? Yet, the MSM casts that aside. So he concentrated on building an internal evidentiary case, showing how a series of acts built to the final denouement. The case he made was not against George W. Bush. It was against the dyed in the wool Neocons Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. His book on the subject, Crossing the Rubicon, is a bit long, but it is surely one of the finest books on that subject one can read.

    As Mike’s manager, Ken Levine, told me, Ruppert was as bad a businessman as he was a good journalist. Therefore, because he was not a good delegator and manager, From the Wilderness never prospered the way it should have. He then moved out of California into the Pacific Northwest and ran into legal problems. This essentially brought down From the Wilderness. I actually tried to buy the publication from him, but he either never got the offer or never seriously considered it.

    Mike tried to make a comeback with the documentary film Collapse. But although that film was a good one there were too many of them out at the time about the economic collapse of 2007-08. It did not do for him what he expected. But Mike kept up his talking and speaking engagements. And I think it’s fitting to remember him by two interviews he did with Allison Weiner on her fine program Media Mayhem. (Click here for these two appearances and here.)

    I didn’t agree with John and Mike on every issue. But most of the time they were on the right track. Beyond that, they provided a serious and credible counterweight to the nonsense of the dying MSM.

    We are all a bit poorer with their leaving us.

    – Jim DiEugenio

  • Robert Groden, Absolute Proof

    Robert Groden occupies a rather illustrious position in the research critical of the Warren Commission. First, he is undoubtedly one of the very foremost experts on the photographs and films in the JFK case. From the past, only people like the late Richard Sprague were in his league. Today, only say a Robin Unger, or Richard Trask can navigate in his territory. (See Unger’s collection.)

    Secondly, Groden was the man who began showing first class copies of the Zapruder film in the early seventies. This culminated in his appearance with Dick Gregory on national television in 1975. On an ABC program hosted by Geraldo Rivera, Groden first revealed to all of America what was on the Zapruder film. Images that Time-Life, Henry Luce, Clare Booth Luce and C. D. Jackson wanted to conceal from the public. Namely that President Kennedy’s entire body rockets backward at Z frame 313, simultaneous with him getting struck in the head from what appears to be a projectile from the front. That signal event, which Gregory and Groden deserve much credit for, was largely responsible for creating a firestorm of controversy throughout the nation. That firestorm quickly led to the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Groden served as chief photo consultant for the HSCA for its duration.

    Groden was later a consultant for Oliver Stone on his film JFK. And then he served as a chief talking head on the TV series The Men Who Killed Kennedy. In 1993, at Abby Rockefeller’s Harvard Conference, he showed the complete Zapruder film, i.e. with no frames missing. That convinced this reviewer that Kennedy was undoubtedly hit before he went behind the freeway sign. Which meant the shot could not have been fired by Oswald, since his vision was obstructed by the branches of an oak tree at that time.

    Groden then moved to Dallas to set up shop to sell his wares in Dealey Plaza. He was a counterweight to the propaganda put out by Gary Mack and The Sixth Floor. Since then the Power Elite in Dallas has harassed him legally by ticketing him over 80 times and actually arresting him. They have not been able to make the charges stick. And Groden has a lawsuit pending against the city at this time. Groden is clearly a heroic figure in the cause of demonstrating the truth about the JFK murder to the public.

    All of which makes me really wish I could like his new book, Absolute Proof, more. Undoubtedly, there are many good things in the oversized, profusely illustrated, coffee table type of book. And I will mention some of those good things in this review. But there are also some very questionable things in the book. Ultimately, the volume comes out as a very mixed bag.

    I

    Groden leads off his book with what is by now the hotly debated McCone-Rowley document. He does here what he did at the Cyril Wecht Conference in Pittsburgh in October. He states that he thinks it is a genuine document. Others, to put it mildly, disagree. For example, Gary Buell has done much good work on it. (See his blog.)

    Besides the document itself, in that link, please note the fax from the National Archives to attorney Jim Lesar. It says that they the archivist checked and there is no such document listed in their index with that date or title on it. Secondly, a document with this kind of information in it, namely that Oswald was trained for espionage work by the CIA and the Navy, would not be classified as just Confidential. Which this is. Because that is the lowest security clearance. Something like the McCone-Rowley document would be classified with the highest security clearance. Which, to my knowledge, is Above Top Secret, For Yours Eyes Only. Third, as Oswald expert John Armstrong has pointed out to this reviewer, in paragraph five, where McCone tells Rowley that Oswald was at Camp Peary in September and October of 1958, Armstrong’s files reveal this not to be the case. Oswald was in the Far East at that time. (E mail from Armstrong, February of 2014.)

    In paragraph six, McCone seems to admit that certain agents of the CIA were involved in what he calls the “Dallas Action.” This is incredible. First, why would McCone ever admit to this in writing? Second, as most observers of the CIA know, McCone was not an insider, or part of the Old Boys Network. He was Kennedy’s personal appointee. The idea that those involved would either 1.) Tell him they were part of the plot, or 2.) Leave a trail that he could attribute it to them, that is, for this reviewer, kind of preposterous.

    In paragraph 8, a real red flag leaps out. The document reads, “It is possible that Oswald, given his instability, might have been involved in some operation concerning Hoffa…” First, as an undercover agent, Oswald displayed little “instability”. From what chroniclers of his intelligence career note, he basically did what he was told. Also, what on earth could be the operation against Hoffa? Why would the FBI or Justice Department need someone like Oswald to use against Jimmy Hoffa? This is so nonsensical that, in and of itself, it should lend a pall of suspicion across the document. Finally, there is the common problem with these suspect documents: there is really nothing in the document information wise which one can verify as being new. Which would have to be the case if McCone really had unearthed the genuine secret files on Oswald.

    In his text, Groden states that this document first surfaced during the Church Committee investigation of the CIA and FBI in 1975. But if the reader clicks through to the discussion of the document on the Randi forum, one will see that it seems to have first appeared in that year also. Originating with a tabloid reporter named James L. Moore. In his book, Groden proffers a document from the Church Committee requesting information from the Secret Service. (p. 8) But there is no proof he produces to show that they sent back this particular document upon the Church Committee’s request. In fact, that the Secret Service would do so seems quite far-fetched. Especially when one realizes the furor that the Church Committee created at the time e.g. with its exposure of the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, and Frank Church calling the CIA an “out of control rogue elephant.”

    In light of all the countervailing evidence suggesting the document is ersatz, the author gets a bit strained when, on page 13, he relies on the McCone-Rowley document to knock down specific “lies and denials’ about Oswald’s ties to intelligence. It gets worse when he then relies for corroboration upon the famous story leaked by the Commission about Oswald having an FBI payroll number of 179. (p. 15) Since many people also suspect that story to be suspect.

    But if the McCone-Rowley document is dubious, it also appears another piece of evidence Groden features near the beginning of the book is also suspect.

    II

    For at least the last 3-4 years Groden has trumpeted a new witness who he says gives Oswald an absolutely airtight alibi. This reviewer actually heard the author talk about this person at the COPA Conference in Dallas three years ago. He again discusses this witness in Chapter 2 of Absolute Proof. Here, he calls this witness Geraldine Reid.

    He begins his discussion by saying that Mrs. Robert Reid, who the Warren Commission interviewed, was named Delores Reid. He then says there was a second Mrs. Reid who also worked on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository and her name was Geraldine Reid. (Groden, p. 20) It is important to detail from his book the importance that Groden gives Geraldine Reid. He writes that the Commission “avoided mentioning this Mrs. Reid like the plague.” Why? Because she was flown to Washington and interrogated by the Commission but her testimony “was so devastating to their preconceived conclusions of Oswald’s guilt that they buried all references to her.” (ibid) Referring to an interview he did with her, Groden writes, “I was threatened to keep my mouth shut, or else.” He then says that the Commission tried to keep Geraldine a secret and concealed the fact there were actually two Mrs. Reids. He then quotes more fully from his interview with the second Mrs. Reid which took place before she passed away relatively recently.

    There were some unusual circumstances to the interview Groden did with this woman. For instance, no tapes were permitted, and Groden was not allowed to refer to her testimony before she passed away. Reid told Groden that about one minute before the shots rang out, Oswald walked into the office on the second floor across from the snack room. He needed some change for the soda machine. He went to Geraldine and gave her a dollar and asked her for change. At that moment they both heard the sound of gunshots. But, oddly, neither of them said anything about the sounds. She continued giving him change and he walked toward the snack room. She concluded her story with, “That’s the last time I saw him until he passed by me a few minutes later as he was leaving the building.” (Groden, p. 21) By this time she had learned what happened and told him that Kennedy had been shot.

    Groden then says he was introduced to Geraldine Reid and her story by a man names David Thiess, a former investigator for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Thiess told him he knew she had been interviewed by the Commission and they had suppressed her story and wiped her out of the record. But further, he had seen the concealed documents about her. Both Reid and Theiss died, Theiss as Absolute Proof was going to press. (ibid)

    After the book was published, Richard Gilbride talked about the Geraldine Reid story at Greg Parker’s fine forum, Reopen Kennedy Case. As the reader can see by reading this fascinating review of the facts, it appears that, to begin with, Groden got some of the details wrong. There was no Delores Reid working in the Depository Building. The Mrs. Robert Reid Groden refers to was first named Geraldean (at times spelled Jeraldean). And she passed away in 1973. So it turns out that there was no Geraldine Reid also, at least with his exact spelling.

    What appears to have happened is that in an FBI report made on November 24th, a Mrs. Sanders talked about Geraldean Reid but the FBI agent incorrectly spelled it as “Geraldine”. But the giveaway is that Sanders gave the agents the phone number of Mrs. Geraldine/Jeraldean Reid, a key point Groden apparently missed. So they were talking about the same person. Obviously, if this was the only Geraldean/Geraldine Reid at the Depository, and she died in 1973, then this could not be the person that Groden talked to several years ago, and who died relatively recently.

    What appears to have happened here is that Mr. Theiss, who conveniently died right before the book came out, somehow concocted a hoax to play on the research community. This is a problem that has plagued the community since 1964. And Groden did not do the proper follow-up to prevent himself from falling for the phony “Geraldine Reid” playlet. We owe thanks to Greg Parker and the frequenters of his forum for correcting the record on this issue.

    III

    Groden also apparently believes in the phenomenon called Badgeman. (See p. 302. I had not really investigated this issue until the 50th anniversary. About a month after that MSM pig out, Oliver Stone got in contact with me and gave me a short list of items he wanted clarified in the wake of that singular and monumental orgy of denial. One of the items on his list was Badgeman. Therefore, I actually began to investigate Badge Man in earnest for the first time.

    For the record, Badge Man first came to the limelight in a big way on Nigel Turner’s original series The Men Who Killed Kennedy. The first go round for the now discredited Turner was broadcast in America in 1991. On that show, the soon to be turncoat Gary Mack, and the late Jack White greatly enlarged, enhanced and colorized an aspect of the famous Mary Moorman photograph which depicts the grassy knoll at the time of the fusillade in Dealey Plaza. After spending several days researching this image I wrote Mr. Stone a memo of about 1.5 pages. I will now excerpt from that memo since Groden accepts Badgeman as an image of a Dallas cop (or someone wearing the uniform)atop the knoll.

    “The last matter you wanted me to look at was Badgeman. I am glad I did since I did not understand all of the problems with this image…it is not an easy matter to decipher.

    First, there is a debate about where the Badgeman figure actually is. At first glance, it appears not to be behind the stockade fence, but behind the shorter retaining wall on the knoll, but not atop it.

    If that is the case, then the problem is simple: How did no one see this guy if he is supposed to be doing what he is doing: shooting at Kennedy? Clearly, someone should have seen a policeman with a rifle there on the grass. The other problem is that when one sees the image here, the top part, head and shoulders, appear too small to be a normal sized person.

    Because of these significant problems at this location – and it sure does seem to me to me to be the correct location – some have said that Badgeman is not really there. He is really behind the stockade fence. In other words, one must add depth perspective. But again, this creates problems. First of all, if one postulates this new position, its not where most observers, including me, think the actual shooting location was. I for one think the actual location was further down the fence, near the triple underpass. Where the fence juts out creating a kind of crease over a sewer grate. To me, that is the best position for an assassin on the stockade fence. This adjusted location for Badgeman is much more further down the knoll, toward the Depository, allowing for a more oblique angle. So much so that I am not sure if the “back and to the left” reaction, which was a keystone of your film, would apply.

    Second, if one postulates this other position, then the problem of having him too small in the foreground now becomes reversed: for now the exposed portions appear much too large to be showing a above the fence line. Therefore, some defenders have provided explanations, like the man is standing on a car bumper further behind the fence.

    Although Lee Bowers did not see what he testified to at this location, but the one further down, if someone had been on a car bumper, it would have been almost right in front of him here. Hard to believe Bowers did not see that.

    It is a really complicated puzzle. Because of all the work done on Badgeman photographically by Jack White and Gary Mack, I agree the photo is suggestive. But I simply do not see how it can be viable with all these inherent problems attached to it.”

    Groden does not even begin to mention these problems with the image. He simply vouches for it as being genuine.

    All of this seems to me to bring up another problem with the book, a lack of sources. Which would be acceptable if the prose was just descriptive of the pictures, and did not relate to any other information besides the photos. But such is not the case. For example, the author places the infamous Dan Rather/Walter Cronkite CBS special in 1966. It aired in 1967. (p. 84) In discussing the treatment of Kennedy at Parkland Hospital, the author says some people turned over the body and saw the back wound. (p. 142) Something like that needed to be profusely annotated. Its not. Apparently under the influence of Philip Nelson, Groden writes that it was Lyndon Johnson who ordered Kennedy’s body to be removed from Parkland Hospital before an autopsy could be performed. (p. 145) Again, this needed to be annotated. Because much of the evidence says this was actually done by the Secret Service, on orders of the Kennedy entourage, e. g. Ken O’Donnell.

    Groden also writes that the Harper Fragment, which many suspect was from the rear of Kennedy’s skull, was found 54 feet to the left rear of the point of impact. (p. 159) Yet in the first FBI reports about the discovery of the fragment, the description attributed to the man who discovered it was that he found it 25 feet to the south of the limousine. Which puts the location to the front of the car. (See this map for the fragment location and the Badgeman height problem.)

    In his discussion of the autopsy, Groden proclaims that Robert Knudsen actually took a second series of photographs of Kennedy’s body. In my opinion, as I discussed in my review of Doug Horne’s book Inside the ARRB, this simply overstates the evidence for forgery. Knudsen may have done this, but it is far from a proven case. (Groden p. 162) Groden also says that Lt. Commander Bruce Pitzer filmed the entire autopsy on 16 mm black and white film. He was working on an edit when he was murdered in his office on October 29, 1966. He then adds that “the murderer stole the film and it hasn’t been seen since.” (ibid, p. 301) It took Pitzer three years to edit an autopsy film? But beyond that, the men Groden relies upon for this version of the Pitzer story, Dan Marvin and Dennis David, have some credibility problems. No one has done more work on the Pitzer case than the estimable Allan Eaglesham. And his final essay on the subject reveals the problems with the testimony of these two men.

    Then there are the problems with Groden’s macro view of the conspiracy. He writes that Carlos Marcello was part of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. (p. 199) Not according to the Church Committee. This was actually added on later by Dan Moldea, a source I would avoid at almost all costs. Groden then writes like Bob Blakey and says that Oswald and Guy Banister were being supervised by Marcello in the summer of 1963. He offers no proof of this, and this reviewer, who has done much work on New Orleans, believe its balderdash.

    After this, the author now turns to Dallas. Groden buys into the whole Murchison ranch assassination party scenario. (pgs. 201-02) And he buys into the most extreme versions, that is as rendered by LBJ did it zealots like Harrison Livingstone and Barr McClellan. That is he puts J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, H. L. Hunt and John McCloy in the midst of the festivities. Along, of course, with LBJ’s oh so late arrival. This is all recycled by these authors through none other than Madeleine Brown. And Groden adds that Brown’s son, Steven, was LBJ’s offspring. Yet, he does not reveal that mother and son waited until after LBJ was dead for 14 years to sue Lady Bird Johnson. (Dallas Morning News, June 19, 1987) That case was dismissed when Steven failed to show in court.

    But years before that, Madeleine and Steven sued another man, lawyer Jerome Ragsdale, on the same charge: that Ragsdale was Steven’s father. Question: What is the worth of a witness like this? Who when the first lawsuit failed, which it did, then sues a “second” father and now begins to talk about the second father’s role in the Kennedy murder. I would say, it’s not worth very much at all. And we should not be dealing with such tales today.

    IV

    As I said, there are good things in the book. Groden was the first to demonstrate–with photos of witnesses indicating the rear of the skull–where they saw a blasted out hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. That is in this book also. Except the author actually extends the number of medical witnesses who say they saw this phenomenon. One which would be impossible if the Warren Commission was correct. These photos of witnesses pointing to the rear of the skull extend from page 149 of the book to page 155. Groden snapped pictures of over 20 of them who saw this damage to the back of Kennedy’s skull. He then uses testimony of some witnesses he could not actually photograph, like Nurse Diana Bowron. Instead he uses a sketch by Bowron of the back of Kennedy’s head. She then wrote that she saw a large wound in the lower right quadrant. She said it was so large she could almost put her fist through it. (p. 152) Another example of testimony used by the author are the words of Petty Officer Chester Moyers at Bethesda Hospital. He said, to the HSCA, that he saw a massive wound of the dimensions of 3 inches by 3 inches in the rear of the head. (p. 156) All in all, the author has collected the testimony of close to 80 witnesses in this regard. Undoubtedly, some skeptics will question some of these people e.g. Jim Tague. But the overwhelming majority of these witnesses seem to me to be credible. When one combines this work with that of Dr. Gary Aguilar on the declassified HSCA depositions on the matter, then the evidence for this gaping rear hole in the rear skull seems to me to be simply overwhelming. This might be the strongest part of the book and the most relevant to the case.

    Groden is a traditionalist in his method of deconstructing the Single Bullet Theory. That is, instead of arguing the provenance of CE 399, he relies on the absurdities of the trajectory analysis. Here he adds in a piece of evidence that is very often absent from the debate: the clothing of Governor John Connally. The entrance hole in the back is way to the right of the jacket, it actually seems beyond the shoulder seam. While the exit is well below the lapel in the front. But further, the author couples these with the Arlen Specter/FBI reconstruction of the motorcade. Clearly, someone told the lawyer about the true location of the back wound, since it was marked well below the president’s jacket collar. (p. 146) And the wound to the extreme right of Connally’s jacket is also marked accurately. Therefore, the question becomes: How did a bullet traveling from right to left hit Kennedy near the middle of the back, slightly to the right of the midline, and then emerge going rightward all the way over to the outside of Connally’s right shoulder? Connally’s comments to Groden about this is quotable. He told the author that the SBT was “absolutely ridiculous”. (p. 147)

    Today’s excuse for this bizarre flight path is the Bugliosi/Dale Myers concoction of Connally sitting inward of Kennedy by six inches. That was pretty much vitiated by Pat Speer when he got the limousine schematic diagram which explicitly showed that the jump seat in front of Kennedy was only 2.5 inches inward from the door. But Groden here goes beyond that. Through a series of photos taken throughout the motorcade, some by Dave Powers who was traveling just behind Kennedy, he shows that Kennedy and Connally were pretty much lined up in tandem to each other. And any discrepancy between the two was pretty minimal. Certainly not enough to account for the bizarre flight path outlined above. (See the photos and discussion on pages 38, 47-48, p. 249 and on pgs. 255-56. This last series of photos seem to me to be quite convincing.)

    Continuing with the medical and ballistics evidence, Groden shows the document which states that there was an FBI receipt for a missile recovered from JFK at the autopsy. (p. 86) He also displays a newspaper article I had never seen before. Here, Dr. George Burkley, the White House doctor, said Kennedy died of a bullet wound in the right temple. (ibid) This was from the Chicago Daily News of November 22, 1963.

    Concerning the SBT, Groden also notes that Dr. Jim Humes wrote notes from messages he got from Parkland Hospital about the diameter of the throat wound as seen by Dr. Malcolm Perry in Dallas. Those notes say the wound was 3-5 mm. (p. 86) Which, if the Warren Commission was right, make the exit wound smaller than the entrance wound in the back. If so, this was pretty much unheard of prior to the Kennedy assassination.

    In more than one place throughout the book, the author shows blown up photos of Kennedy’s back wound. (See pgs. 91, 97-99, p. 144) He makes an interesting argument that 1.) The actual pictures appear to show two wounds, and 2.) The HSCA doctored the original photos in their artistic renditions to show only one wound. Groden argues that the hole on top is an exit wound from the shot to the throat. The hole below it, by about 1.5 inches, is the entrance wound in the back. Groden adds that Humes took the projectile out of this wound and it’s the “missile receipt” mentioned above. I must say, Groden’s photos are so large and clear that this argument, which I had never really encountered before, has some cogency to it.

    The author has always maintained that certain photos and frames from the Zapruder film do show a hole in the back of Kennedy’s skull. He does that here again with an extreme blow up of the Mary Moorman photograph. And it does seem to show some kind of cavity in the back of Kennedy ‘s head during the shooting sequence. (p. 179)

    Groden has always been a believer in the acoustics evidence. This was a dictabelt motorcycle tape recording made in Dealey Plaza, supposedly of the shots ringing out. Professor Don Thomas gave the acoustics evidence some ballast when he published a peer reviewed paper supporting that evidence. Since then Thomas has jousted with critics of his work several times. By any objective means, he has defended himself adequately. Groden brings up the argument that if one buys the acoustics evidence, the shots are arranged too close together to be fired by Oswald. The time interim separating two of the shots is 1.7 seconds. Yet, when the FBI tested the rifle, it took them 2.3 seconds to recycle the weapon. (p. 82)

    In relation to this point, Groden prints an FBI document from the day of the murder. It was from the agent in charge in Dallas, Gordon Shanklin. This document clearly implies that Shanklin is referring to two separate bullets which struck Kennedy and Connally. It was written before the cover story about the SBT had been enacted. (p. 253)

    Furthering this quandary about the ballistics evidence, Groden chimes in on the debate begun by Noel Twyman concerning just how many shells and live rounds were found by the Dallas Police on the sixth floor of the Texas School Bok Depository. Through the work of Allan Eaglesham and his interviews with photographer Tom Alyea, we know that the crime scene as depicted in the Warren Commission photos was made up after the fact. It does not show what was really there in the early minutes after the shooting. (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, by James DiEugenio, p. 343) Groden devotes three pages to this issue. (Groden, pgs. 273-75) He features five photos and five documents. He makes a rather interesting case that there were two spent rounds and one live round found on the sixth floor, not three shells. For this author, this point has become an issue of real and vital contention in the evidentiary record.

    Another good point Groden makes is about he configuration of witnesses in Dealey Plaza, and which way they ran once the shots were heard. Propagandists like John McAdams and Dave Reitzes try to say that there really was not much of a difference between the number of witnesses who heard shots from the grassy knoll, and those who heard them from behind the president. But the problem with this is that the FBI never made a systematic attempt to track down each and every witness in Dealey Plaza and elicit their best recollection about the direction and number of the shots. Clearly, what J. Edgar Hoover and the Warren Commission did was to cherry pick the witnesses who testified before the Commission in order to cover up what the real ear witness testimony would have been. Because, as Groden shows in his book, and as he did in Black Op Radio’s 50 Reasons for 50 Years segment, is that the vast majority of witnesses ran to the grassy knoll area once they heard the shots ring out. And it does not seem to even be really close in number to those who ran to points behind the limousine. (See the photos from pgs. 68-75)

    There are also good things in the book about the media. Groden touches on the relationship between Bill Paley of CBS and the CIA. And he especially hones in on the recent wave of dubious documentaries (which should actually be called mockumentaries) on cable television, e.g. the Discovery Channel .

    As I said, Bob Groden has been a true champion of the case for the public. He has devoted much of his adult life trying to show that the Warren Commission was nothing but a sham meant to conceal the true facts of Kennedy’s death. His current book is a decidedly mixed bag of virtues and liabilities. But taken as a trilogy, his last three books – this one, The Killing of a President, and The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald – form what is the best photo library available in book form on this case. Although this volume, as demonstrated above, is not up to the standard of the previous two, the series as a whole is very much worth having.

  • Vincent M. Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt

    Vince Palamara is, with little question, the critical author who has the most knowledge of the failures of the Secret Service in their obligation to protect President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. In other fields of knowledge and information e.g. who is the most outstanding expert in the medical field, on Jim Garrison, on the HSCA etc., there is some room for debate. But very few would argue about Palamara being on first base in regards to the Secret Service.

    Well over a decade ago, Palamara put together a self-published manuscript of his work in that area. It was also called Survivor’s Guilt. By his own admission, he then burnt out on the case. He succumbed to the hype about Vincent Bugliosi’s colossal charade of a book, Reclaiming History. Impressed by the prosecutor’s reputation, the author put together a You Tube video in which he said that Bugliosi had solved the case. Thankfully, several months later, Palamara then reversed himself on the subject of Reclaiming History. He has since written some good reviews for this site on books by Gerald Blaine and Clint Hill. He also has his own blog, and maintains a site which commemorates the heroism of Abraham Bolden. So today, Palamara is back in good standing among the critics.

    The 2013 version of Survivor’s Guilt runs to about 430 pages of text. In this reviewer’s opinion, the first half of the book is rewarding, informative and well worth reading. That first half makes up one of the more distinctive efforts timed for the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder. It is well argued, profusely and accurately documented, and is quite frank and candid about what went wrong in Dealey Plaza, and why it is hard to buy the Secret Service’s incredibly poor performance as a case of pure negligence. There are 18 chapters in the book. The first half, that is up to Chapter 9, makes up the worthwhile part of the work. So let us discuss that valuable part at this time.

    I

    Palamara begins the book with what most would think is some of his strongest material indicating a cover up after the fact by the Secret Service. In the days after the murder, there were questions as to why there were no agents riding on the rear bumper of Kennedy’s limousine at the time of the shooting. After all, this is what the specially modeled bumper is designed for. But at the time the limousine entered Dealey Plaza, there were no agents in place on the rear bumper.

    This is an important point to explore. Because if one buys the Warren Commission verdict of three shots from the rear, then having no agents on the rear of the car probably had an effect on the shooting. At the least, if they had been in place, it would have made it more difficult. The Warren Commission had questions about this also. (Palamara, p. 3) Therefore, Secret Service Director James Rowley had five affidavits prepared about their experiences with President Kennedy. As the author notes, “At first glance, all five reports appear to support the notion that President Kennedy did not want agents on or near the rear of his limousine.” (ibid, emphasis added) The five reports were allegedly done by Jerry Behn, Floyd Boring, Emory Roberts, John Ready and Clint Hill.

    The problem with this evidence is that it seems clearly coerced by Rowley. Why? Because when Palamara later interviewed many of these agents, they contradicted what they had written for the Commission. For instance, when Palamara talked to Boring, the agent said that Kennedy did not exercise control over them at all. (ibid, p. 6) Clint Hill told the author that Kennedy never told the agents not to ride on the car. But he further added that, “I had never heard the president ever question procedural recommendations by his Secret Service detail. (ibid, p. 14) In fact, earlier in the Dallas motorcade, Hill actually was on the bumper. (ibid, p. 11)

    Palamara notes other oddities about these submissions. Three of the five reports are not even on official Secret Service stationery. They are on plain typing paper. Clint Hill’s report is not even dated. Four of the five reports are based on exchanges with Boring. In other words, the agents heard this from him. Yet, as the author points out, this was later contradicted by Boring. Gerald Blaine even says there was a Secret Service meeting on November 25th, in which it was decided to cover up Kennedy’s orders not to ride on the car. As Palamara points out, this is absurd. The implication is that Rowley made some of the agents switch the blame for the Secret Service’s lack of protection to Kennedy.

    Palamara further points out the absurdity of Blaine and Rowley’s positions by mentioning the famous film of agent Donald Lawton being called off the back of the limousine by Emory Roberts as it pulled out of Love Field. Lawton memorably shrugs his shoulders in bewilderment three times as this recall. Palamara further adds that agent Henry Rybka was supposed to be in the follow up car. But, in fact, inexplicably, Rybka was left at the airport. (ibid, p. 9)

    Further, and quite compellingly, Palamara now goes to other agents ignored by Rowley. He asks them if Kennedy ever directed the Secret Service not to ride on the back of the limousine. This list of agents goes on well into the double digits. It includes people like Winston Lawson , Rufus Youngblood, and Sam Kinney. Almost none of them back up what Rowley is proffering. For instance, Kinney states, “That is absolutely, positively false … no, no, no. He [Kennedy] had nothing to do with that. No, never.” (ibid, p. 27) Arthur Godfrey said, “That’s a bunch of baloney; that’s not true.” When Palamara asked John F. Norris about the charge against Kennedy, he replied, “I would doubt that very much.” (ibid, p. 28) Jerry O’Rourke wrote to the author, “Did President Kennedy order us off the steps of the limo? To my knowledge, President Kennedy never ordered us to leave the limo.” (ibid, p. 37)

    Clearly, from this opening episode the author is implying that there was some very odd behavior by the Secret Service in Dallas. And secondly, Rowley was intent on covering it up, by any means necessary. Even if it meant he was going to blame the victim for his own death. Palamara then goes on to mention how this myth then got enshrined in the literature by writers like William Manchester, Blaine and Ron Kessler. (ibid, pgs. 19, 20) In fact, Palamara points out that fellow Secret Service agent Talmadge Bailey told him that Blaine made up the information about the November 25, 1963 meeting. (ibid. p. 23) Palamara also points out that Blaine submitted what he termed to be contemporaneous handwritten notes to the National Archives. The author then notes glaring discrepancies which indicate that these “contemporaneous notes” were obviously composed at least months, if not years later. (ibid)

    This opening chapter closes with more interesting evidence discrediting the “Kennedy ordered the agents off the car” myth. Roy Kellerman was the de facto man in charge of the Secret Service detail in Dallas. This was because, Gerald Behn, who should have been in charge on the ground, decided to take a leave at the time. Kellerman testified to the Warren Commission for two days. If Boring had actually relayed a Kennedy order to the Secret Service on this point, would not have Kellerman known about it? If that is so, then why did he not mention it during his two days of testimony? (ibid, p. 43)

    II

    In Chapter 2, Palamara notes another rather bizarre oddity about the failure of the Secret Service in Dallas.

    Most informed observers understand that Dallas was not really in Kennedy’s back pocket politically. In fact, there were many sectors of rightwing animus towards the president. And for a variety of reasons: civil rights, his failure to invade Cuba in 1961 or 1962, his attempt to lower the oil depletion allowance etc. In Miami when the Secret Service checked the security index, they came up with six pages of warnings about people like Orlando Bosch and Pedro Diaz Lanz.(p. 169) Yet, when Secret Service agents Winston Lawson and Kellerman checked the indices of the Protection Research Section (PRS) files for any threats on November 8th and 10th, none were found. Youngblood did a check on the morning of November 22nd. Again, no warnings turned up. This is astonishing; on many different levels. First of all, there was a Cuban exile community in Dallas. In fact, there was a small unit of Alpha 66 in town, one of the most high profile and militant anti-Castro groups in existence. Second, Dallas was the home of former General Edwin Walker. Kennedy had removed Walker from his command for passing out John Birch literature to his men. After this, Walker lived in Dallas. He became quite close to some extreme rightwing groups there. He was also active in the riots at Ole Miss over the entry of James Meredith, an entry which Kennedy backed forcefully. Third, a few months earlier, Kennedy’s UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been in town. He was reportedly spat upon and even jostled with a placard. Fourth, in November, Joseph Milteer had already told FBI informant Willie Somersett about a coming assassination attempt on Kennedy from an office building with a high-powered rifle. Why did the Secret Service not have this information in their PRS files? Or anything about the failed attempt to kill Kennedy in Chicago, which predated all three checks.

    Further, there seems to have been some last minute switches in personnel in the November trips to Chicago, Miami, New York and Dallas. For instance, although Glen Bennett was on a temporary assignment for the Presidential Protection Division (PPD), he was on the trips to Tampa and Dallas. Yet, Bennett told the HSCA he was not on this Florida trip, which was on November 18th. (ibid, p. 62) Bennett was detailed from PRS to PPD and then onto protection duty in New York, Tampa and Dallas. Tim McIntyre also denied he was on protection details in November in Chicago and Miami. Yet, he was. This is interesting because there were threats on JFK’s life in both Miami and Tampa. Therefore, PRS and the White House Secret Service detail should have been ratcheted up to the equivalent of Defcon 5 by Dallas. Especially after the (now famous) Chicago attempt on Kennedy’s life. Yet, as everyone knows, most significantly the author, nothing of the sort happened in Dallas. In fact, as Palamara is at pains to show, quite the opposite occurred. Instead of a tightening of security around Kennedy, a loosening of security occurred. A loosening so blatant and extraordinary, that it seems today to cross over into the negligent. If not worse.

    III

    In Chapters 3 and 4, Palamara details two significant aspects of the Secret Service failure in Dallas. He devotes Chapter 3 to denuding another attempt by the White House detail to blame the victim for his own murder. With ample evidence, he shows that it was not Kennedy who wanted the bubble top removed in Dallas. That was a Secret Service decision. (p. 91)

    Chapter 4 is devoted to the setting of the motorcade route. This is a key point. Because as anyone who has been to the Dealey Plaza, triple underpass site will know, the two turns made by the motorcade into the plaza, onto Houston and then Elm, created an almost ideal situation for what military assassins call an L shaped ambush. That is a slow moving target, vulnerable to snipers from concealed places at three points surrounding the target. In addition, the location allowed for easy exits since there were parking lots adjoining at least two sniper locations: the Depository and the grassy knoll. Palamara does some good and interesting work in regard to the mystery of how this bizarre, indefensible route was chosen. He states that considering the fact that agent Gerald Behn, White House assistant Ken O’Donnell and Kennedy advance man Jerry Bruno were all opposed to the Trade Mart as the dinner destination, its seems odd that it was ultimately chosen. (pgs. 98-101) As late as November 14th, there was no dogleg on the motorcade route. The route came straight down Main Street. (ibid, p. 102)

    The author makes the case that the two men who added the dogleg onto Houston and Elm Streets were Secret Service agents Forrest Sorrels and Winston Lawson. There were other routes possible, and the motorcade route was not automatically determined by the selection of the Trade Mart. (ibid, p. 103) Palamara later adds that the final route was not actually decided upon until November 20th. He feels that this change, which included the dogleg, was kept secret after being authorized in Washington by agent Floyd Boring. In a suppressed Commission document the author found, the assistant police chief, Charles Batchelor, revealed that the secrecy about this change in the route made it hard for the local authorities to furnish any help to the Secret Service. (p. 105) Another witness, Sgt. Sam Bellah told the author that the police did not know about the route change until the evening of November 21st. Bellah said the original plan did not have the motorcade pass in front of the Texas School Book Depository. Bellah said that his commander, Captain Lawrence, came to his home late on the evening of the 21st. He took him to the triple underpass to show Bellah the new route for the motorcycle advance escort, of which Bellah was a part. (ibid) Bellah said that there was never any explanation as to why the route was changed at the last moment.

    Another local policeman, Captain Orville Jones told author Larry Sneed the same thing. That the motorcade route was changed just prior to the 22nd. Jones told the author that many people he knew in the Secret Service did not approve of going through Dealey Plaza at all. There were other routes discussed which avoided the triple underpass. (ibid)

    Another witness to this strange alteration was motorcycle officer Bobby Joe Dale. Dale said that there was more than one route discussed and reviewed by the police. In fact, three had been bandied about. Dale said it was not until Kennedy’s arrival at Love Field that morning that he was alerted to what the actual route was going to be. (ibid, p. 106)

    Winston Lawson told the Warren Commission that the dogleg was necessary, “Because it is my understanding there isn’t any entrance to the freeway on Main Street.” (ibid, p. 108) But as the HSCA correctly noted, ” … the Trade Mart was accessible from beyond the triple underpass in such a way that it was not necessary to enter the Elm Street ramp to the expressway. The motorcade could have proceeded westward through Dealey Plaza on Main Street, passed under the underpass and then proceeded on Industrial Boulevard to the Trade Mart.” (ibid) In fact, this is the route that Jones thought Kennedy would take that day. As the HSCA attorney in charge of the motorcade route inquiry wrote, “Any map of Dallas in 1963 shows that it was easy to reach the Trade Mart on streets that join Main on the West side of the overpass.”

    Compounding this shockingly poor choice of a route was the fact that Secret Service protocol was then broken while it was being navigated. Two years before Kennedy’s murder, Mike Torina, Chief Inspector, stated that whenever a motorcade must slow down for a turn, the entire intersection must be checked in advance.(p. 109) That did not occur here.

    James Rowley wrote to the Commission that he had no knowledge of who actually released the motorcade route to the press. This seems another deception by Rowley. Palamara says it was Betty Forsling Harris a Dallas socialite on the local committee, who did so. She was working closely with representatives of John Connally, the Secret Service, and LBJ aide Bill Moyers. Palamara concludes that this false information was given out for purposes of plausible deniability. That is, the Secret Service could later say that the route was purposely advertised in more than one configuration to show that there was more than one option in hand. When, in reality, the Secret Service knew between November 18th and 20th what the actual route was, including the dogleg.

    This is a quite disturbing issue. In and of itself it seems simply bizarre that Lawson and Sorrels would choose this incredibly dangerous route. But then to not protect the president as he was going through this dangerous path is even more bizarre.

    Once this route was chosen, then the only way it could be made secure was by the Secret Service being supplemented by local law enforcement agents i.e. the police, the sheriff’s office, military intelligence. Again, none of this happened. According to the author, Sheriff Decker told his men not to participate in any security operations. Palamara then writes that the local Dallas police force was called off the night before by the Secret Service. (p. 118) Captain Will Fritz was supposed to commander a detail riding behind the Vice-President with rapid-fire machine guns. According to two sources, this was changed the night before. Instead, this detail was sent to the Trade Mart to protect the speaker’s stand.

    Palamara now brings in witnesses like former Eisenhower press secretary Jim Haggerty, and former agent Darwin Horn who state that supplementing the Secret Service with local police was a common practice. He then quotes Winston Lawson as denying this before the Warren Commission under oath. His specific words were, “This was not usual procedure.” (ibid)

    Palamara now makes a penultimate point about the arrangement of the motorcade. Military aide Godfrey McHugh almost always rode in the president’s car on these occasions. Yet, in Dallas, another anomaly took place. In Dallas, he was asked by the Secret Service “for the first time” to “ride in the back, instead, as normally I would do, between the driver and the Secret Service agent in charge of the trip.” (p. 119) The reason given was this would allow the president fuller exposure to the crowd. As Air Force aide, one of McHugh’s duties was to supervise Air Force One.

    Finally, the author notes that Batchelor told the Commission that he did not think any local authorities were in place below Houston Street. He then quotes William Manchester as writing, “Possibly [Police Chief] Curry’s department met its responsibilities by deciding to end supervision of Friday’s crowd at Houston and Main, a block short of the ambush … ” Manchester then added, perhaps for ironic effect, “The weakest link in downtown Dallas was Dealey Plaza.” (p. 120)

    As Palamara points out with detailed accuracy, everything about this route, from its unnecessary choice, to the lack of supporting personnel, to the violation of protocol, to the secrecy about which route was actually to be used, to the almost incredible lack of protection at its most exposed point, cried out for a thorough investigation. To put it mildly, that did not happen.

    IV

    From here, Palamara now moves to probably his most grievous charge against the Secret Service. He calls it “security stripping”. The author notes that as of November 10th, there were 18 motorcycles listed in the motorcade. Buy by November 21st, Winston Lawson had decreased the amount or motorcycles on either side of the limousine from four to two. (ibid, p. 131) At Love Field the orders were relayed for the cycles to ride to the rear of the car. Dallas policeman Marrion Baker wrote the author that he never got to the bottom of this strange order. Fellow policeman cyclist B. J. Martin said the same thing about this formation. That it was given to them at Love Field. And it was the weirdest formation he ever heard of. Martin said, “Ordinarily, you bracket the car with four motorcycles, one on each fender.” (ibid, p. 133) HSCA attorney, Belford Lawson wrote about this matter: “The question that must be answered is why the instructions were given to the officers so shortly before the motorcade…” (ibid, p. 132) In fact, two of the motorcycle cops were so far to the rear of Kennedy, that they weren’t even on the same street with him when he was shot. (ibid, p. 134)

    By way of comparison, the author compares the protection in Tampa, with that in Dallas. There it was much tighter and there were police on top of tall buildings. (ibid, p. 136) Interestingly, Lawson was the advance man on presidential visits that year to Little Rock and Billings, Montana. Those records were destroyed in 1995, after the creation of the ARRB.

    The HSCA shined a light of this issue when it wrote the following: “The Secret Service’s alteration of the original Dallas Police Department motorcycle deployment plan prevented the use of maximum possible security precautions.” It then continues with another comparison, “Surprisingly, the security measure used in the prior motorcades during the same Texas visit shows that the deployment of motorcycles in Dallas by the Secret Service may have been uniquely insecure.” (ibid, pgs. 137-38)

    Palamara now points out still another anomaly about the Dallas motorcade. There was a flat bed truck with the media aboard that was supposed to ride in front of the president’s car. Again, according to members of the press, this was cancelled at the last minute. The press was moved much further back and placed in Chevy convertibles. (ibid, p. 139) Palamara fairly poses the question: “Was the motorcade manipulated to prevent photographic records of the crime from being made.” (p. 139) Which they probably would have been if the truck was in front of Kennedy.

    The same exchange of proximity applies to the president’s physician George Burkley. Burkley said he virtually always rode in close proximity to the president. He could think of only one previous exception, the visit to Rome in July of 1963. But in Dallas, he was actually relegated to a bus at the rear of the motorcade. (ibid, p. 142) This, of course, delayed his reaction time in getting to the president. Towards the end of this discussion of the out of order cars, and passengers, Palamara then drips in another interesting tidbit. It was Lawson who was in charge of the car numbers for the motorcade. (p. 143) The author says these changes occurred somewhere between November 19th and the 22nd. And Lawson tried to pass them off to advance man Jack Puterbaugh. (ibid) But Palamara writes, Puterbaugh never made any mention of any such responsibility on his part. HSCA attorney Belford Lawson again summed the situation up well: “Why was there so much juggling around and controversy about seating at Love Field, and why was there so much constant repositioning and shuffling of dignitaries’ cars in relation to press cars during the Texas trip?” Lawson then added another tantalizing question: “Why was the [Dallas] motorcade longer than any other motorcade on the Texas trip?” (ibid, p. 144) Unfortunately, the HSCA never answered these pointed and crucial questions in anywhere near a satisfactory manner.

    From here Palamara now segues to violations of Secret Service protocol according to various manuals. A prime example was the overpass over Elm Street . It should have been cleared of bystanders. It was not. (ibid, p. 144) Buildings were not checked. Even on the dogleg through the Plaza. Buildings should have been checked in the dogleg onto Houston Street. They were not. (ibid, p. 146)According to inspector Michael Torina, agents and police officers should have been standing atop tall buildings. (p. 147) There should have been policemen facing the crowds. As they had been in Fort Worth. There also should have been military officers on hand, as they had been in San Antonio the day before. (p. 150)

    And, of course, there was the incident at the late night bar called The Cellar. This is where several agents spent the night before drinking hard alcohol. The agents stayed there until at least 3:00 AM. Some stayed even later than that. This was an obvious violation of rules of conduct since the morning call was at seven. But further, the Secret Service then hired local firemen to protect the president while they were partying. In a high-risk city like Dallas. Yet, no one was punished for this clear violation. As many have asked, how can agents react quickly and smoothly with so much alcohol in them. (pgs. 150) Palamara compares the reaction time of Johnson’s Secret Service protector, Rufus Youngblood, which was almost instant, with JFK’s which was very slow. Perhaps fatally slow. Or as former Secret Service officer John Norris stated in colorful language, “Except for George Hickey and Clint Hill, everybody else just basically sat there with their thumbs up their butts while the president was gunned down in front of them.” (Palamara, p. 152) Making this violation even worse was Hill’s comments on the later Secret Service sex scandal in Cartagena Columbia. Hill said, “There’s no tolerance at all , no room for any misbehavior in the Secret Service. There’s no loose chain. You are on the clock from the time you leave, until the time you return home.” As many know, Rowley deliberately chose not to punish anyone even though he knew about the incident.

    As the author then notes, what makes all this malfeasance even more suspicious is that there seems to be an institutional memory about it. For as Palamara notes in the book, in January of 1995, the Secret Service destroyed some records, including presidential protection survey reports for some of Kennedy’s visits in the fall of 1963. (p. 161) This was after the formation of the Assassination Records Review Board. Further, it was discovered that agent James Mostrovito did destroy documents, but he also got rid of a vial containing a portion of Kennedy’s brain. He then went on to a career in the CIA.

    The author concludes this section of the book with a look at the behavior of agent Bill Greer, the driver of Kennedy’s car. He first notes that ordinarily, the Secret Service liked to maintain speeds of at least 20-30 MPH. Which was much faster than what Dealey Plaza allowed. He also adds that, at the first shot, Greer slowed the car down. He then turned around. Kellerman shouted, “Let’s get out of here!” But Greer did not. He disobeyed a superior and turned around again. (p. 188)

    Later on, Greer and Kellerman said there was bullet expelled from the president’s body through cardiac massage. (p. 195) Further, even though agent Richard Johnsen was an important witness to the chain of possession of CE 399, he was not interviewed by the FBI or the WC. The author then makes an error in his discussion of the provenance of CE 399. He writes that Elmer Lee Todd initialed CE 399. Not so. Hoover said this happened. But his initials are not on the bullet today. Which is utterly bizarre. Palamara recovers a bit when he then writes that Dr. Robert Shaw announced that CE 399 was still in Connally’s leg, when in fact, according to the Commission it was being carried on a plane to Washington. And secondly, as Robert Harris has noted, Connally wrote that a bullet fell out of his body after CE 399 was discovered. (Palamara pgs. 197-98)

    Palamara goes on with Secret Service malfeasance in the wake of Kennedy’s murder. The Secret Service did not produce the clothing of the president when the doctors asked for it at Bethesda. A roll of 120 film was destroyed by a Secret Service agent that night. (ibid, p. 199) Admiral David Osborne sated that an intact bullet fell out of Kennedy’s clothing at Bethesda. Osborne added, “Several people had it. I know the Secret Service had it…” And Palamara also notes the role of the infamous Secret Service agent Elmer Moore in altering the first day testimony of the Parkland doctors about the direction of the bullet that pierced Kennedy’s throat. Originally reported as being an entrance wound, after Moore was done massaging the testimony of the doctors and nurses at Parkland, the Commission had enough leeway to make this an exit wound for the SBT.

    V

    The above constitutes what I believe to be the contributions of (considerable) value in this book. From about page 210 on, that is approximately the second half, the quality of the work drops off. And the approach changes. As does the level of the analysis. For instance, at around this point, Palamara begins to rely upon witnesses like Gerry Patrick Hemming, a man who the late, great Gaeton Fonzi warned us all about. Recall, Hemming is the guy who confirmed the Marita Lorenz assassination caravan. Palamara interviewed him twice. (pgs. 213-14) As if that is not enough, the author now brings in DNC advance man Martin Underwood in a big way. (p. 214) Underwood is the guy who the lamentable Gus Russo dug up to try and say that Fabian Escalante and the Cuban G-2 were actually in on the Kennedy murder plot. When Underwood testified before the ARRB, as they revealed in their report, it turned out his so-called contemporaneous notes on official stationary were neither contemporaneous nor official. This was such a blatant Russo ploy, even Max Holland saw through it. I mean when one Oswald did it zealot goes after another zealot, you know the witness has problems. As Underwood does.

    Underwood tells the author that CIA station chief Win Scott told him things he never told anyone. Including his wives and son. Underwood was on a mission for LBJ. LBJ wanted to know what really happened with the JFK case. So Marty goes to talk to Scott in Mexico. Scott tells this low level flunky that the CIA, FBI and the Mob all knew Kennedy was going to be hit. But not just that. They all knew it was going to be on 11/22/63 in Dallas! But eve that it not good enough for Underwood, who here actually goes beyond his flights of fancy for Russo. Let me quote what Underwood tells Palamara: “His number was on the board. I found out later, if they missed him in Dallas, they were thinking of getting him at the LBJ ranch.” (p. 215) This is Alex Jones stuff. But now, good ole Marty goes to see Sam Giancana. Sam tells him to tell Johnson that the Mafia had him on their hit list also.

    But Underwood now tells the author that 18 hours before the landing at Love Field, they were getting all sorts of solid reports about Kennedy being assassinated in Texas. Well, Underwood now goes to the president and tells him about this. What does JFK say? According to Underwood, he replies with “Marty, you worry about me to much.” (ibid)

    Enough about Underwood.

    From here, Palamara now begins a long section of the book which he would have been well advised to forsake. For literally scores of pages, he catalogues the names of dozens of Secret Service agents and what their performance was like in relation to the JFK assassination. I did not understand why he did this. In the fine opening 200 pages of the book, Palamara clearly named the agents he felt should have been seriously investigated, and why. Further, many of the people he names here had little or nothing to do with the assassination. So this gets both superfluous and boring. It’s not all like that of course. But the author would have been much better off trimming this section down by at least 50%. It goes on for more than a hundred pages.

    At the end, Palamara concludes with a couple of more dubious chapters. In Chapter 15, where he talks about a motive for the Secret Service to go along with a plot, he actually brings up Sy Hersh’s excremental book, The Dark Side of Camelot. In other words because Kennedy was having affairs, the Secret Service looked askance at him as being of low character. (p. 385) I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this. These are the same guys who Abe Bolden said were heavy drinkers and also serial womanizers. But yet, they could not stomach Kennedy’s philandering? Which we know through many good sources was exaggerated. In fact, by these same Secret Service agents who Hersh enlisted in his cause.

    The author gets back on track a bit by mentioning Elmer Moore’s rightwing politics and his outburst against Kennedy for selling out the country to the Reds. This seems much more realistic as a motive for complicity.

    At the end, Palamara lists a very good chronicle of failures by the Secret Service in Dallas. (p. 387) It goes on for three pages. It is very provocative and even disturbing. The author uses it to crystallize the argument he has been making without being explicit about it. That is, after explaining all these serious lapses in protection which enabled the murder to take place, he concludes that the Secret Service was not just negligent, but culpable in the assassination. With the amount of evidence in the first half of the book, it’s hard to disagree with him.

    In sum, I feel about this work as I do about Doug Horne’s multi- volume set. Palamara needed an editor to control his excesses. If he had done that a book worth reading would have been sterling.

  • Robert Dallek, Camelot’s Court / An Unfinished Life

    Robert Dallek Camouflages John F. Kennedy, Twice

    Robert Dallek had been a longtime history professor at UCLA with about ten books on American history under his belt when he published a 700-page biography of John F Kennedy, An Unfinished Life. That volume was timed for release in 2003, at the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder. Then, in 2013, for the fiftieth anniversary, Dallek published another biography of Kennedy. This one was called Camelot’s Court. The ostensible reason for the second book was that it was more focused on other figures in Kennedy’s White House. This was a rather dubious pretext for Dallek to use. For the second book is almost wholly reliant on the first.

    An Unfinished Life was rather quickly embraced by the mainstream media at the time of its publication. In fact, newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have since accepted it as a – perhaps the – standard biography of both Kennedy and his presidency. The Atlantic Monthly has also embraced Dallek and given him much space. He has since made many appearances on television, even one with Jon Stewart. At the 50th anniversary, PBS made a four-hour two part series largely based on his work. This was the longest program aired during that three week avalanche of denial.

    If an historian is to be judged as having done a good and complete job, generally speaking, that means three major traits are manifest in his work. First, he produced something that was in some way new and original. Second, he was fair, objective and complete in his depiction of his subject. Third, his work did not cut corners or use questionable sources in order to fulfill a pre-conceived agenda.

    In these books, it is very hard to give Dallek passing grades in those three areas. In the area of surfacing anything new, An Unfinished Life was trumpeted as dealing with many of the drugs and medicines Kennedy had to use for his back and adrenal ailments. Its not like this material had not been out there before. It had been available in several other books. Dallek just went further with it and in more detail. But the relevant question has always been: Did these medications impact Kennedy’s performance in any way? In a 2003 interview with Juan Williams of NPR, Dallek himself concluded they had not. Which is a judgment that almost any Kennedy historian could have delivered without these records.

    The second “new” element used to market the book was an alleged discovery Dallek made about a heretofore unknown dalliance Kennedy had with one Mimi Alford, who’s name in 1963 was Marion Beardsley. Alford went in An Unfinished Life by her maiden name in the trade paperback edition. But she did not appear in public or write anything. That all changed in 2012. Now she wrote a book and went on a book tour. The MSM was greatly interested for a week or so. But Alford, and her book quickly disappeared. It wasn’t until afterwards that researchers like Greg Parker, Tom Scully, and Vince Palamara began to poke holes in the specious Dallek/Alford story. I cannot do better than to refer the reader to Parker’s fine work on this subject (also see Parker’s Fiddle & Faddle). But no matter how many holes were poked in this story, Dallek used it again in Camelot’s Court, published in 2013. Here he actually quotes the Alford book in saying Kennedy slept with her during the Missile Crisis, and told her he would rather his children be Red than dead. (Camelot’s Court, p. 330) This is after Kennedy has demanded that every missile be removed from Cuba, and that any missile launched from there would meet with a retaliatory strike from him at the Soviet Union.

    In reality, what was trumpeted as new in An Unfinished Life was, in the first case, irrelevant, and in the second case, with Alford, quite dubious. Therefore, what any real critic should have asked was: is there anything else to recommend these books? In other words, what is there of real and lasting value in Dallek’s work about Kennedy? Let us now deal with that substantial, but ignored, matter.

    II

    To begin to answer that question, one must say that even though the combined length of the books is well over 1,100 pages, one begins to sense that Dallek’s work is not at all complete. The first thing one notices is the absence of a very important influence on young Congressman John Kennedy. In fact, today, some would say it might have been the single most important influence in forming his view of the world. You will not find the name of Edmund Gullion in either book. Which, today, is pretty much inexcusable. Especially after the work of Richard Mahoney and James W. Douglass; respectively JFK: Ordeal in Africa, and JFK and the Unspeakable. Quite naturally, it follows that neither of those books is in either of Dallek’s bibliographies. And that tells us something about his work. Because even though Mahoney’s milestone book gets the back of Dallek’s hand, and Douglass’ fine volume is absent from Camelot’s Court, somehow Dallek did find the space and time to list books about Kennedy by authors like the late John Davis, the writing team of Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Victor Lasky, Thomas C. Reeves, Chris Matthews, and Seymour Hersh. Now, some of these books are written by rightwing hitmen e.g. Collier, Horowitz, Reeves and Lasky. Some are very questionable works by people who were on the make, like Matthews and Davis. Hersh’s book is an out and out hatchet job done for big money. And make no mistake, Dallek uses these books. Why the author would use these kinds of books, but not Mahoney or Douglass, makes his book – to put it mildly – incomplete and lopsided.

    The case of State Department official Edmund Gullion is a good example as to why. Gullion was an important figure for Mahoney and Douglass-and for this reviewer in Destiny Betrayed – because he had a definite impact on Kennedy’s thinking about the issue of anti-communism in the Third World. As Mahoney details in his fine book, it was after his 1951 meeting with Gullion in Saigon that Kennedy began making speeches railing against American foreign policy by both parties in the Third World. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 21-22) These early speeches are pretty much absent from both of Dallek’s books.

    Kennedy’s opposition to Operation Vulture is simply absent from Dallek. In fact, you will not find it in the index to either book. Vulture was the Dulles brothers’ solution to lift the siege of Dien Bien Phu and save the French empire in Indochina. It was a giant air armada of well over 200 planes designed to bomb North Vietnamese General Giap’s army, which was closing in on Dien Bien Phu in 1954. That mission included the dropping of three atomic bombs. Senator Kennedy rose on the senate floor twice to object to this mission and ask John Foster Dulles how atomic weapons are meant to be used within the tactics of guerilla warfare. (ibid, p. 23) Also missing from Dallek’s 1,100 pages is the letter that Kennedy wrote to Foster Dulles asking him what his plans were for Vietnam after France fell. (ibid)

    These points are important for two reasons. First, they clearly show a growing conflict between the Dulles/Eisenhower/Nixon view of Vietnam and Third World colonialism, and Senator Kennedy’s. Second, all of this will inform Kennedy’s policy toward Vietnam and Southeast Asia when he becomes president. It helps demonstrate why Cold Warrior Lyndon Johnson was so eager to involve America directly in Indochina and why Kennedy was not.

    All of these shortcomings and lacunae presage what Dallek is going to do with the great Algeria speech Kennedy gave in 1957. Many people, including myself, think this speech might be the greatest Kennedy ever gave. It was courageous since it clearly marked out and named the GOP White House team as being complicit with France in trying to crush the colonial rebellion in Algeria, part of the French African empire. The speech itself is an impressive piece of understanding, insight and nuance, at times, almost visionary. Kennedy actually warns against the dangers of Arab radicalism breaking out against the USA if it insists on being on the wrong side of the struggle. Recall, this was 1957 and Kennedy was 39 years old. Mahoney, understanding its importance, spends over seven pages on the speech and its aftermath. (Mahoney, pgs. 19-27) Dallek spends one paragraph on it. (An Unfinished Life, p. 222)

    Dallek does discuss an article that Kennedy wrote in Foreign Affairs on the subject. But he quotes it very briefly, and then says that Kennedy’s proposals for change were as limited as Eisenhower’s. He then adds, Chris Matthews’ style, that Kennedy’s article was really “a political slogan as much as it was a genuine departure in thinking about overseas affairs.” (ibid, p. 223)

    When I read that, I understood what Dallek was up to. No objective scholar could write such a thing. For the simple reason that Kennedy’s speech, and his ideas, were anything but a political slogan. They were so complex and subtle that one could not express them in a slogan. They reflected a change in Kennedy’s thinking which Gullion had launched six years before. And those ideas would be implemented in the White House in relation to leaders like Patrice Lumumba, Achmed Sukarno and Gamal Abdel Nasser; in places like Congo and Indonesia and Egypt. But just as Dallek does not mention Gullion, he does not mention Nasser or Sukarno, and he deals with Lumumba and the colossal Congo crisis in just two paragraphs. (An Unfinished Life, pgs. 348-49) And to put it mildly, those two paragraphs are pretty much a distortion of what really happened there.

    III

    When I read those two paragraphs, I again saw what Dallek was up to. Dallek tries to draw the Congo struggle as a competitive affair between Kennedy and the Russians. In other words, primarily as an extension of the Cold War. This is simply not accurate or nearly complete. For, unlike Eisenhower, Kennedy did not see Congo as a primarily East-West struggle. As with Algeria, Kennedy saw the Congo as a nationalist crusade by the local rebels against European imperialism. Incredibly, Dallek mentions the colonizing country of Belgium exactly once in those two paragraphs. He mentions Khrushchev or the USSR six times. And even though this titanic struggle went on for the entire three years Kennedy was in office, this is the only place where Dallek deals with it. Therefore, the whole idea that Kennedy took up the struggle that U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld began – which is what happened – is completely lost. After Hammarskjold was murdered, Kennedy worked with the United Nations to make sure Belgium would not retake the country, or that European imperialism would not dominate it. For those European interests (and the CIA) were working to split the very wealthy Katanga province off from the rest of the country. Dallek mentions Katanga. He does not mention this aspect of the imperial struggle around it.

    In fact, Dallek actually writes that Khrushchev accused Hammarskjöld of plotting to kill Lumumba. (An Unfinished Life, p. 349) That accusation was false. But what he leaves out is that Eisenhower and Allen Dulles actually plotted to kill Lumumba. Which is true. (DiEugenio, p. 28) Further, some writers feel these plots were hurried along by Dulles. Because he knew that, once inaugurated, Kennedy would back Lumumba. Which, not knowing he was dead, Kennedy did. (ibid, p. 29) Finally, Dallek leaves out the fact that Congo was really the first foreign policy issue which Kennedy fully addressed with an intense policy review. And when he formulated this policy, it ended up being a reversal of what had preceded him in the Eisenhower White House. (DiEugenio, p. 29)

    As the reader can see by now, Dallek has designed both of his books along the lines that Larry Sabato did in The Kennedy Half Century. They are not full and complete works which try and capture all nuances and tendencies in an objective manner; a manner which will actually elucidate for and enlighten the reader. Like Sabato, Dallek wishes to constrict the biography he is writing to keep Kennedy from being any kind of liberal icon.

    If one needs any more proof of that, then all one needs to do is take a look at what Dallek does with Senator Kennedy and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Dallek writes that Kennedy’s support for the far-reaching powers of Title III, which allowed the Attorney General to intercede in state cases where he could establish discrimination, was simply showboating. Kennedy knew it would not pass in the final form. (An Unfinished Life, pgs. 216-17) But it did pass in slightly modified form in the final bill. And one can observe by just reading the legislation, especially Parts 3 and 4.

    As the reader can see, in Part IV, section c, it allowed for the Attorney General to institute civil actions when he thought voter discrimination was taking place. In my review of Sabato’s book I showed, from personal correspondence, this was the part of the law that Kennedy was actively interested in. It was not any kind of “liberal posing” either. Which is what Dallek tried to dismiss it as. Kennedy really thought this would be a good and effective way to challenge voter discrimination laws in the south. As I further wrote in that review, that is what he told his campaign staff in October of 1960: that he would challenge voter discrimination with Title 3 once he was elected. And this is what he did once Robert Kennedy was approved as Attorney General. There is a through line here which Dallek camouflages.

    Dallek tries to blunt the impact of Kennedy’s epochal civil rights achievements in ways similar to Sabato. He tries to say that Kennedy did not sign an open housing bill until 1962. (Camelot’s Court, p. 251) Again, as Helen Fuller explained in Year of Trial, it was never a question as to if Kennedy was going to sign the open housing order. It was simply a matter of trying to get his trade bill through congress. Something he did not think he could do if he signed the housing bill first. (Fuller, pgs. 37-42)

    Dallek also criticizes Kennedy for appointing judges who would not support his civil rights program. (Camelot’s Court, p. 251) Again, this does not tell the whole story. Bobby Kennedy discussed this problem in the posthumous oral history entitled Robert Kennedy: In His Own Words. President Kennedy did not really appoint these judges. This whole appointment privilege had evolved over time as a result of the advise and consent clause of the constitution. When a vacancy would appear, senators would recommend a short list from which the president would then choose. As RFK said, if the president did not choose, then the senator might be in a position to bottle up whole parts of the president’s legislative program. As, for example, Senator Bob Kerr could have down with Kennedy’s revenue and tax programs. (Robert Kennedy : In His Own Words, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffery Shulman, pgs. 107-118) RFK is very frank and honest about this dilemma he and his brother faced. And also how they tried to navigate a system they did not like, and had nothing to do with constructing. I would be able to treat Dallek more respectfully if it was not so obvious that he had read this book. I would also be less dismissive if he noted that this problem confronted both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Yet Kennedy did more for civil rights in less than three years than either of those presidents did in twenty.

    This points up another serious failing in Dallek’s work. One way that a historian/biographer elucidates his subject is by using contrast. That is, what came before him that either influenced the subject or which he rebelled against. As we have seen, Dallek does not even mention Edmund Gullion. But also, Dallek spends very little time on the character of John Foster Dulles. Which is odd since, as most historians of Eisenhower explain, Foster Dulles had an inordinate amount of influence in the White House. For example, I could not find the fine book, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia in either of his bibliographies. That book was published in 1995, eight years before An Unfinished Life. With reference to that work, Dallek could have studied the contrast between the Dulles’ brothers approach to Sukarno and Indonesia, and Kennedy’s. After all, Foster Dulles did try to overthrow Sukarno in 1958. Kennedy tried hard to mend that relationship. To the point that he negotiated with the Dutch to return West Irian back to Indonesia, something Dulles would not do. The significance of this is that West Irian was either as rich, or richer, in mineral wealth as Katanga. Again, this was a perfect example of what Kennedy was talking about in his 1957 speech, about the problems with the Foster Dulles approach to anti-communism in the Third World. And it was a concrete example of Kennedy acting to change that. If you ignore all of this-Foster Dulles, the 1958 coup attempt, Kennedy and West Irian-then you can reduce Kennedy’s ideas on the subject to just slogans. But that is not writing good history. Its censoring history.

    The final stroke of contrast in the episode would be what happened to Indonesia after Kennedy’s assassination. Within about 18 months of Kennedy’s death, the CIA was now going to make another attempt to displace Sukarno. Lyndon Johnson owed some political favors for his 1964 election to backers who had corporate interests in Indonesia. He placed some of them in a position to influence American foreign policy there. In late 1964, the Dutch intercepted a cable saying that Indonesia would soon fall into the hands of the west. Ten months later, in October of 1965, the CIA’s attempt to dethrone the non-aligned Sukarno succeeded. (DiEugenio, p. 375) It’s most unusual that Dallek left the Indonesia coup story out. Because he had previously written a two part biography of Johnson. But again, these are the kinds of things that allow an historian to mark differences in approach by presidents. Authors like Ronald Rakove in his book Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, understood this part of the contrast, the Kennedy-Johnson part. Dallek either does not comprehend it, or he wants to ignore it. Either way his books suffer because of it.

    IV

    There is another lack in these books that Dallek seems unaware of. Dallek is not the stylist, that say, Robert Caro is. Whatever the failings of Caro, the man is an elegant wordsmith. Dallek is perhaps serviceable in that regard. But there is a larger point here that relates to the lack of building any contrast between Eisenhower and Kennedy. That is the issue of the character and shape of the Sixties. Because he makes so little of what preceded Kennedy – Eisenhower/Dulles and the Fifties – Dallek completely misses the explosiveness of the new decade. But further, because his portrait of Kennedy is so constricted, he fails to place Kennedy as the man who helped launch that sensational decade. In other words, there is simply no attempt to capture the temper of the times. And as anyone can attest, they were explosive times to live through. Its obvious today, as historian Philip Muehlenbeck has noted, that Kennedy designed his foreign policy as a reaction to what he was opposed to previously. As Muehlenbeck notes in his fine book, Betting on the Africans, Kennedy spoke about this difference to both George Ball and Harris Wofford. He consciously and specifically rejected the policies of both previous Secretaries of State: Dean Acheson and Foster Dulles. (Muehlenbeck, p. 37) As Ball noted, Kennedy did not want the USA to back the status quo in the Third World. Which usually meant that America would be against nationalism and non-alignment. Kennedy wanted the USA to break out of that Cold War paradigm of “you’re either for us or against us.” Kennedy understood that if America rejected the nationalist and revolutionary leaders, they would inevitably turn toward the Soviets. Therefore, America should amend its policies so as not to be seen resisting the tides of history. (ibid, p. xiv)

    Kennedy mentioned the continent of Africa 479 times during his campaign speeches. He then sent an expedition to Africa led by Senator Frank Church. Church recommended “sweeping changes in America’s attitude towards Africa.” Again, this shows that Dallek is just plain wrong in his characterization of the Algeria speech. Kennedy was not just sloganeering. Because those ideas all ended up influencing his policies. And it resulted in a break with Eisenhower. And not just in the Congo, where Dulles and Eisenhower wanted Lumumba dead. For the first time, the USA voted with an African nation and against the European powers at the United Nations. (ibid, p. 97) Kennedy said he would not trade votes there in order to “prevent subjugated people from being heard.” Even the New York Times understood this was a major shift in American foreign policy. And they called it that. (ibid) What does it say when the New York Times notes a milestone and historian Dallek misses it? Kennedy was consciously breaking with Foster Dulles and what he represented.

    But the point is, because Kennedy’s foreign policy and his civil rights program contrasted with Eisenhower, it was part of the new excitement of the early sixties. Kennedy had promised to get the country moving again with his New Frontier speech at his nominating convention. And this became a part of the trajectory of that fateful decade. One that began with so much expectation and hope. Yet it ended with tens of thousands of body bags returned from Indochina, Nixon as president, blood in the streets of Chicago, and LSD everywhere, perhaps supplied by the CIA. The end was captured symbolically by the stoned out acid rock of Woodstock. Dallek has no sensitivity to any of this. Or President Kennedy’s role in it.

    V

    With Dallek, its instructive I believe to begin with the end of his first book, An Unfinished Life. As noted, he was very much interested in noting Kennedy’s medical conditions and ailments. And since he had a big publisher in Little, Brown and Company, and the book was coming out at the 40th anniversary, he was clearly courting the MSM.

    Therefore, at the end of the book, he clearly comes down in the “Oswald as lone assassin” camp. But he actually goes beyond that. He borrows a phony fact from Seymour Hersh and his trashy The Dark Side of Camelot. Hersh was also in the Oswald did it camp. But he wanted to partly blame Kennedy’s death on himself. So he wrote that, Kennedy may have survived the first shot. But his back brace kept him upright, and this set him up for the fatal headshot.

    Now, in the intervening seven years between when Hersh wrote that balderdash, and Dallek published An Unfinished Life, more than one writer noted that Hersh was off base here in both his information and implication. Kennedy’s “back brace” was really more like a thick belt with a wrapping bandage. (See Robert Groden, Absolute Proof, p. 175) It was therefore flexible. It did not stop him from tilting forward or downward. Dallek could have easily looked this up. The fact that he 1.) trusted Hersh, and 2.) included it without cross-checking, is revealing. (Dallek, p. 694)

    But that’s not all. Dallek recites the whole Warren Commission creed about the Kennedy assassination. Oswald is referred to as “an unstable ne’er-do-well”, who had a “mail-order Italian rifle”from which he fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. Incredibly, and like his mindless quoting of Hersh, he also writes that a bullet struck “Kennedy in the back of the neck.” (ibid) Which is another lie. We know from the autopsy photos that this wound was not in the neck. It was in Kennedy’s back. But these kinds of things don’ t matter to him.

    Going back from this point, in both books, Dallek closes with Kennedy’s Vietnam policy. Like Larry Sabato, Dallek cannot bring himself to write the phrase “National Security Action Memorandum 263”. In over 1,100 pages of text, I couldn’t find the term. There seems to be a kind of general understanding among those in the media that this is now a taboo phrase. It reached the heights of absurdity in the Tom Brokaw/Gus Russo NBC special, Where Were You? There, either Russo or Brokaw got Richard Reeves, whose book on Kennedy is even worse than either of Dallek’s, to say that this executive order only meant to return kitchen help from Vietnam.

    Dallek is not quite that goofy – or mercenary. But he does something fairly odd. Something that does not align with the new record adduced by scholars like Howard Jones. In both books, he actually tries to insinuate that it was really Defense Secretary Robert McNamara who recommended to Kennedy a withdrawal plan, one beginning in 1963 and culminating in 1965. ( E.g. Camelot’s Court, p. 411) It is true that the actual NSAM does say that Kennedy accepted a recommendation by McNamara and Maxwell Taylor to withdraw a thousand military personnel by the end of 1963. But in the larger context of the issue, to lay the withdrawal plan at McNamara’s feet is simply wrong headed. So much so that it only makes sense as part of the author’s larger scheme: to make JFK into a Cold Warrior, only a slightly more mild and stylish version than Eisenhower or LBJ. Dallek’s problem is that his McNamara thesis is completely counterfeit.

    For many, many years – actually decades – Vietnam had been saddled with the subtitle of being McNamara’s War. In other words, contrary to what Dallek is postulating here, many observers saw it as a war that McNamara actually advocated. This is how bad the MSM reporting on that war actually was. There was some evidence for this of course. During the debates about inserting combat troops in 1961, McNamara was one of the many who advised Kennedy to do so.

    Incredibly, in one part of An Unfinished Life, Dallek writes that no one wanted combat troops injected into Vietnam in 1961. (p. 443) Gordon Goldstein has demonstrated that this is simply false. In his fine book, Lessons in Disaster, Goldstein pinpoints nine different requests for combat troops that year from several different sources-including Defense Secretary McNamara! (Goldstein, pgs. 52-58) These were all submitted before the delivery to Kennedy of the trip report by Max Taylor and Walt Rostow, which again, requested combat troops. Kennedy turned that down also. In light of these facts, what Dallek does here is to seriously distort the issue, and Kennedy’s role in it. Many of the president’s advisers-e.g. Rostow, Taylor, Ambassador Nolting, Ed Lansdale, and Deputy Defense Secretary Alexis Johnson – wanted him to insert combat troops into Vietnam in 1961. It was Kennedy who rejected each proposal. As Goldstein notes, only two men backed Kennedy in arguing against Americanizing the war: George Ball and John Kenneth Galbraith. They were outnumbered by a factor of about 3 to 1.

    So for Dallek to also write that somehow, the idea to withdraw was McNamara’s, this is doubly bizarre. Because, in 1961, McNamara requested combat troops, not once, but twice. The first time he requested 3,600 men. But in the November debates over the Taylor-Rostow report, he upped this to over 60,000! (Goldstein, p. 60) And he argued in a memo that these were needed in order to stop the domino effect from taking place in Indochina. So the obvious question is one that Dallek does not pose. The obvious question is: How and why did McNamara switch sides by 1963? Because it’s quite clear that this happened. There is an October 1963 tape of a meeting between Kennedy, McNamara and McGeorge Bundy in which McNamara essentially insists that they must begin to disengage from Vietnam. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, pgs. 99-103) When Goldstein heard this tape he was so stunned that he asked: Who is this guy? (ibid, p. 124) In other words, how did McNamara go from one side of the issue to the other, and then back again in 1964. So much so that the Vietnam War bore his name?

    Dallek cannot answer these questions because, again, he leaves the relevant information out. The book Virtual JFK was published in 2009. So there really is no excuse for the following information not being in Camelot’s Court. In late 1961, Kennedy sent Galbraith to Saigon in order to give him a counter-report to what Taylor and Rostow had submitted, the insertion of combat troops. Galbraith returned a report saying that there was really no point in America staying in Vietnam. That report was handed to McNamara. As Roswell Gilpatric, a McNamara deputy, later stated, Kennedy had now entrusted McNamara to begin to wind down American involvement in the war. (Blight, pgs. 125, 371) This is an important point, both generally and specifically. Generally, it pinpoints the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. Specifically, it counters the Dallek idea that the plan originated with McNamara. It also shows how and why McNamara switched sides. You will not find this turning point in either of Dallek’s books.

    The next step in the withdrawal plan is also seriously discounted by Dallek. After getting his instructions, McNamara then tasked the Pentagon with putting together a withdrawal plan. Predictably, they dragged their feet. But in May of 1963, there was a meeting in Hawaii at which McNamara conferred with a large in-country task force from Vietnam. At this meeting, McNamara heard from each department and reviewed their individual plans for leaving the country. If anything, he wanted the plans speeded up. The documents on this meeting, declassified in 1997, were one of the key finds released by the ARRB. (DiEugenio, p. 366)

    The way Dallek handles this key discovery is puzzling. In Camelot’s Court, he writes that McNamara directed the Pentagon to discuss a plan to withdraw. Be he says this was done for fear of a coup against Diem. He then discussed it with Kennedy. (p. 349). In the earlier book, he wrote that in May of 1963, “Kennedy began planning the withdrawal of U.S. military advisers.” (An Unfinished Life, p. 668) But he based this on oral conversations Kennedy had with people like Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers and John McCone. Which were related after the fact. This allows him to then write: “But a plan was not a commitment.” (ibid) In neither instance does he refer to the Hawaii meeting. Nor does he refer to any of the declassified documents. Which, with pages of transcriptions of dialogue, numbers, and datelines, certainly does constitute a plan. Again, it is very hard to believe that Dallek was not aware of this new and crucial Hawaii record. Because when it was released, stories were written about it in the mainstream press e.g. The New York Times.

    As late as the autumn of 1963, Dallek is still doing what he can to separate Kennedy from a withdrawal plan. Dallek mentions the trip to Vietnam by McNamara and Taylor at that time. He then says that they told Kennedy that the major part of the mission would be done by 1965 and the USA could begin withdrawing advisers in December of 1963. (Camelot’s Court, p. 411) He then writes that the two emissaries “gave no explanation for why the United States could leave Vietnam in a little over two years.”

    This might take the cake as far as keeping the president away from his own initiated policy. As both John Newman and Fletcher Prouty revealed many years ago, this trip was really more like a staged playlet. The trip report was not written by McNamara or Taylor. It was penned in Washington by General Victor Krulak under the direction of President Kennedy. While composing the report, Krulak was working from instructions he had been given before the visiting party left! (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 401) He carried the drafts to the White House each day for approval. In other words, the report by Taylor and McNamara was not presented to Kennedy. Kennedy’s report, written in Washington, was presented to those two men. And the reason it included a phased withdrawal was because that is the objective Kennedy wanted. (ibid, p. 402) Only if this is all left out, which Dallek does, can one add the superfluous and pointless rejoinder about the two men not giving any explanation as to why the Unites States should leave Vietnam.

    In light of what we know today, the whole Vietnam aspect of the book is simply obfuscation and camouflage.

    VI

    Another way to measure the qualities of historical scholarship is through the process called synthesis. That is, how does the author put together pieces of new and old information in order to form a cohesive whole? For example, Philip Melanson’s 1990 Spy Saga, did not really contain very much new information on Lee Oswald. But it was, by far, the best biography to appear up until that time. Simply because of the way he synthesized other information in a new and coherent mosaic. It became the first biography of Oswald that showed him as an intelligence agent. Its influence on what came after was formidable. For anyone who had read Spy Saga could never again look at Oswald the way the Warren Commission portrayed him.

    With this in mind, it’s interesting to examine what Dallek does with the November 2nd coup in Saigon against Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu. As the years go one, many authors have somehow tried to blame the coup, and the subsequent murders of Diem and his brother, on President Kennedy. This includes those on the right and the left, like Tom Blanton, John Prados and the National Security Archive at George Washington University. (Which is also still trying to deny Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam.)

    We all know the sorry origins behind this movement. It began during Watergate. Charles Colson and Richard Nixon wanted to somehow say that Kennedy was responsible for the coup and the murders. So they sent Howard Hunt out trying to find witnesses and documents to show this was the case. Hunt couldn’t find anything. But that was not a real problem. He then set about trying to forge a paper trail.

    Dallek is not anywhere near that bad with the record. But he does do some rather inexplicable things. As most knowledgeable observers understand, by the summer of 1963, there was a split in Kennedy’s government between those who wanted to maintain Diem as the chief of South Vietnam, and those who wanted to try and foment a coup to replace him. The reason being that, the Catholics Diem and Nhu, had become so intolerable of the Buddhists, and so anti-democratic, that the Saigon government was beginning to fall apart. Those who wanted to oust Diem were mostly concentrated in the State Department. They included Roger Hilsman, Averill Harriman, Michael Forrestal, George Ball, and, at times, even Secretary of State Dean Rusk. This cabal thought that there simply was no way that Diem’s tyrannical rule, and his brother’s brutal suppression tactics, could ever unite South Vietnam into a credible war effort against the north.

    The real beginning of this terrible division was in January of 1963 and the disappointing results at the Battle of Ap Bac. This is where a division of the South Vietnamese Army faced off against a much smaller force of Viet Cong over two days. Even though Diem’s troops had much more firepower and were supported by American advisers and helicopters, they were routed by the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong sustained less than half the casualties in both dead and wounded as opposed to the government. At the time of this battle, Forrestal and Hilsman were in Vietnam. (Newman, p. 305) They now began to understand that the Pentagon had been lying about the progress of the war effort there. American adviser Jean Paul Vann was on the scene. Through his press contacts with New York Times reporter David Halberstam, he now tried to expose just how bad the war effort was going. He pointed to a cover-up in the Pentagon being run by General Paul Harkins. (ibid, pgs. 306-08) Vann, along with Halberstam, now began to decry Diem’s leadership and acknowledge that direct American involvement was needed. Which was the last thing Kennedy wanted to do.

    This military failure, plus the popular civil unrest over Diem and Nhu’s draconian security forces, managed to split Kennedy’s government into two camps. As Dallek notes, that summer, Rusk sent an unauthorized memo to Diem ordering him to soften his treatment of the Buddhists. (Camelot’s Court, p. 352) At the beginning of August, Hilsman told Ball that there was a 50-50 chance for a coup, and that he was in contact with opposition leaders since he wanted to control the outcome. (ibid, p. 394) What made Diem’s position even more untenable were the vocal outcries against the Buddhists by his sister-in-law Madame Nhu. In late August, even Diem’s own national security adviser told the American embassy, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, that the Nhus had to go. At this same time, Kennedy was desperately trying to get information on who was leading the crackdown against the Buddhists. (ibid, p. 396)

    It is instructive at this point to note what happened next. Because most scholars consider it the single most important event leading to the actual coup. On August 21st, Hilsman cabled Lodge to ask him for the latest information on the scene. After a short stay in Tokyo, Lodge would arrive in Saigon the next day. The sending of that cable, knowing Lodge had yet to arrive, and requesting information about the politics of the new milieu, that should tell the reader something was not quite as it seemed. For how could Lodge understand what was going on in just one day? Nevertheless, within 48 hours of his arrival – on Saturday August 24th – Lodge wired back Hilsman. In fact, on that day Lodge sent back three cables. They culminated with a wire saying that the generals in Saigon said that all the USA had to do was indicate they wanted Diem and the Nhus gone, and they would be gone. (Newman, p. 346) This is startling because Lodge had been there for less than 48 hours. But already, he was not just advocating for a coup. He was relaying messages from the forces who were in a position to perform one. One has to wonder: Were these the men Hilsman was already in contact with? And is this why Hilsman sent the cable on the 21st?

    Because clearly, what seems to have happened next was planned by that State Department cabal in advance. In order to make Kennedy do something he did not want to do: get rid of Diem. They waited for this weekend not just because Lodge – who also wanted to expel Diem – was in Saigon, but also because almost all the major national security players were out of town. This included Rusk, McNamara, CIA Director John McCone, Gilpatric, and Kennedy. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy also appears to have been absent. The cabal therefore was able to send a reply to Lodge without the reply going through normal channels of debate and approval. The reply sent back – commonly called the Saturday Night Special – demanded the removal of Nhu; and if he did not go peacefully, Diem may not survive. Lodge was then told to consult with the military about these moves and get their approval. Diem was to be given the opportunity to retire his brother. But if he did not, then the USA would accept the implication that Diem could no longer be supported.

    Now, why do I say that this whole scenario seemed planned by the State Department cabal in advance? Because that is what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor realized when he saw the cable. He wrote that once he read it, he immediately understood that:

    …the anti-Diem group centered in State had taken advantage of the absence of the principal officials to get out instructions that would have never been approved as written under normal circumstances. (Newman, p. 349)

    Yet he did not call Kennedy to relay this suspicion. Either on the night of the 24th, or on Sunday, the 25th. Taylor also told Krulak that the cable showed the desire of Hilsman and Forrestal to be rid of Diem, and if McGeorge Bundy had been in town, it would never have been approved or sent. (ibid, p. 350) Kennedy said he would approve the cable only if certain others did. To put it succinctly, he was deceived by the State Department about who signed off on it in order to get it sent. Kennedy had specifically requested McCone’s approval. McCone never saw the cable. (ibid, p. 351) But further, unlike what was in the instructions, once it arrived in Saigon, Lodge never showed the cable to Diem. On Sunday, he went straight to the generals. Again, this was done without Kennedy’s approval. In fact, it is uncertain as to who OK’d this revision in the plan. It may have been George Ball. (ibid, p. 350)

    Kennedy was furious when he returned to Washington. Forrestal, one of the plotters, offered to resign. Kennedy said, “You’re not worth firing. You owe me something.” (ibid, p. 351) Clearly, Kennedy was upset about what happened ands its implications for his policy. For as Dean Rusk told him the next day, it would now mean either getting all our forces out, or moving American troops in. (Ibid, p. 351)

    Now, let us compare the above with what Dallek writes in his books about what happened that fateful weekend. In that regard, reading An Unfinished Life is a bit unsettling. For in a rather disturbing lacuna, the reader will not see any of this in the book! Not one sentence about the State Department subterfuge, or Kennedy’s anger about it. Dallek even writes that when Lodge asked to revise the cable and go directly to the generals with it, bypassing Diem, Kennedy agreed to this. (An Unfinished Life, pgs. 673-74) The author supplies no footnote for that sentence. Probably because there is no record of any communication between Lodge and Kennedy that weekend.

    In Camelot’s Court, Dallek spends all of two paragraphs on the subterfuge. Again, without providing the proper context. And he is also misleading. For example, he writes that Taylor was told Kennedy had approved the dispatch. (p. 397) Dallek does not say that 1.) Kennedy had demanded certain contingencies for his approval, which were not met, and 2.) Taylor was not shown the cable until after it was sent to Saigon. (Newman, p. 349) Probably because, as with McCone, the plotters knew he would not approve it.

    What this did of course was create a new situation in Saigon. Now, certain military officers there seemed predisposed to move against Diem. Kennedy realized that the US delegation would now feel obligated to go even beyond what was in the cable. Especially since, as Jim Douglass showed in JFK and the Unspeakable, Lodge had teamed up with CIA officer Lucien Conein to encourage the plotters. Lodge also helped remove the CIA station chief who was supportive of Diem. But further, as Dallek notes, Harriman and Hilsman then got George Ball to countermand orders from the White House to slow down the process and discourage the coup plotters. On October 27th, Ball signed a cable giving Lodge permission to give a green light to the military. (Camelot’s Court, p. 414) When McGeorge Bundy found out about this, he and Kennedy now tried to channel any further communications to Saigon through the White House. (ibid, p. 415) It was too late. Five days later the plotters, with much help from Lodge and Conein, succeeded. Not only was Diem’s government overturned, Diem and Nhu were murdered. As Douglass shows, beyond any doubt, Lodge and Conein were relaying messages to the generals as to where the brothers were located so there would be no escape for them.

    When it was all over, a disheartened Kennedy taped an anguished monologue in which he described his advisers as being completely split on the issue. He also mourned the fact that he had mishandled the original cable. It should have never gone out on the weekend in the form it did. (ibid, p. 418)

    As with Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam, Dallek badly mangles the whole scenario dealing with the coup against Diem. It is badly truncated in the first book, and only slightly less so in Camelot’s Court. But in both, the idea seems to be to downplay the secret maneuvering around Kennedy by people who were trying to make him do something he did not want to do. Which, of course, is the theme of Newman’s milestone book. A big part of Dallek’s agenda is to try and make everyone forget about JFK and Vietnam.

    VII

    Correspondingly, and predictably, Dallek tries to insinuate Kennedy into the plots to kill Castro. (An Unfinished Life, p. 439) To do so, be again breaks the rules of historiography. As we saw with Vietnam, Dallek refused to consult the primary documents, the May 1963 Sec/Def meeting, which would vitiate his “no plan to withdraw” agenda. With the Castro plots, he does the same. He does not use the declassified CIA Inspector General Report. That document specifically contradicts what he wants to imply. For it says the CIA could not claim executive approval for the plots. (IG Report, p. 89) What does the historian do instead? Dallek uses George Smathers’ 1988 statements to implicate Kennedy. In doing so, he commits another lapse. He does not inform the reader that, at that time, Smathers contradicted his earlier testimony to the Church Committee. (James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, editors, The Assassinations, pgs. 328-29) But that’s not enough. He then commits a third error. He says the plots may have been excessive but it was the Mongoose program instituted by Kennedy that provided the license and atmosphere for the plots. (Camelot’s Court, p. 220) As every informed observer knows, the problem in saying that is that the CIA plots to kill Castro did not begin under Kennedy. They started under Eisenhower.

    One of the oddest imbalances in An Unfinished Life is the short shrift Dallek gives to the Bay of Pigs and its aftermath. The historian gives the Bay of Pigs all of five pages, but for example, he gives the Berlin Crisis seventeen pages. This strikes me as being quite a strange allotment. In my own book, the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, I devoted an entire 22-page chapter to the Bay of Pigs episode. I did that for many reasons. But one of them was that the ARRB had declassified two previously secret reports on the incident: Lyman Kirkpatrick’s CIA Inspector General report, and second, the White House internal inquiry led by General Maxwell Taylor. In my book I referenced many footnotes to this new data.

    Dallek references the Kirkpatrick report ever so slightly. He then makes almost no references to the Taylor Report in An Unfinished Life. (See pgs. 362-67) In Camelot’s Court, he chides Kennedy for appointing Allen Dulles to the investigating committee. But for anyone who reads the record of the Taylor Committee, this allowed Bobby Kennedy, who was also on the committee, to listen to every question, and watch every move made by Dulles. It also allowed RFK to then pose pointed questions to Dulles. It is from Dulles’ lame answers that the Kennedys discovered the worst: that the CIA knew the operation would fail. And they banked on JFK taking back his previous public statement, about no American intervention in Cuba, to save the invasion. (DiEugenio, pgs. 42-44) This is why President Kennedy was so upset afterwards. He tried to rein in the Agency through special instructions to foreign ambassadors abroad, and the issuing of three NSAM’s, taking power from the CIA and giving it to the Pentagon. (ibid, pgs. 52-53)

    Throughout Camelot’s Court, Dallek tries to keep alive the myth of the “cancellation” of the D-Day air strikes. It is clear from the declassified record that these were always contingent upon securing a landing strip on the island. (ibid, pgs. 45-46) Which the invasion never did. Finally, Dallek leaves out the way that Dulles and Howard Hunt hit back at Kennedy for firing Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Dick Bissell. During the Taylor hearings, Hunt was detailed to Dulles. Realizing the writing was on the wall for Dulles’ termination, they prepared a counterattack. That was through the infamous Fortune Magazine story blaming the failure at the Bay of Pigs on Kennedy. (ibid, p. 55) That article created the myth about the “cancelled” D-Day air strikes.

    In sum, there is not one original quality about Dallek’s writing on the Bay of Pigs in either book. Which, considering the fact both books were written after the record was declassified, is really quite a negative achievement.

    No surprise, with Dallek, the Alliance for Progress was just an anti-communist gimmick with very little to show for it. It paled in comparison with FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy. (An Unfinished Life, pgs. 467-68) This, of course, ignores Kennedy’s ideas about economic development in the Third World. Ideas, which as I have tried to show, Kennedy was nurturing from his days as a senator and his opposition to the policies of John Foster Dulles. In a speech in Puerto Rico in 1958, Kennedy urged that Latin America be given a new priority by the White House. And he warned that not all the problems there were communist-inspired. He also endorsed the idea of an Inter-American Bank furnishing loans to encourage land reform. (Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 191)

    He again talked about these problems in an interview in 1959. He said the goal of raising the standards of living in Third World countries was something the USA should understand. And if a country wanted to remain neutral in the Cold War, then the USA had to live with that, and simultaneously help solve these internal economic problems. (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, p. 39) What Kennedy was trying to do was break out of the Cold War confines that Dulles and Eisenhower had created. He was trying to find ways to allow for the Unites States to accept the non-aligned status of nations like Egypt and Indonesia. With the Alliance for Progress he was trying to extend help to the fledgling countries of South America. He was trying to show that, unlike Foster Dulles, he understood the economic havoc created by centuries of colonialism. And, unlike Dulles, he did not want to settle for a new form of that situation, be it called neo-colonialism, or imperialism.

    Kennedy understood the system that the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Export-Import Bank had created after the war. As Donald Gibson notes, Kennedy was not content with it. He once said, the desire to help our fellow citizens of the world had apparently been superseded by the narrow interests of bankers and self-seeking politicians. (Gibson, p. 37) As is his natural tendency, Dallek does not describe this prior existing system, or its many shortcomings. Which, as time has gone on, have become more and more exposed. This was done most recently and effectively by John Perkins in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. As Perkins notes, these policies have tended to favor a small group of international oligarchs whose prime objective has been to keep Third World countries in economic debt while instilling a program of austerity and little in the way of public programs. This is why, to mention one example, Castro rejected this kind of aid package and turned toward the Soviets.

    In the evolution of his ideas on the subject, Kennedy understood that Castro’s choice was actually not so outlandish. Therefore, he thought that one way to compete with the Russians was to loosen up on the requirements of the whole World Bank, Exim Bank and IMF system. Therefore, in 1961, he proposed to congress a different kind of loan system. One that was more interested in infrastructure development, long-term loans, and low interest rates. In that address, Kennedy specifically said that these kinds of loans should not be considered in the realm of normal banking practice. (Gibson, pgs. 37-38) Another objective of Kennedy’s program was to shift the volume of funding away from military aid and toward development. This was another break with the Dulles/Eisenhower approach.

    The Alliance for Progress, which was specifically aimed at making these kinds of loans in South America, was a favorite of Kennedy’s. When announced, it was bitterly attacked by upholders of the status quo on various grounds. But in a speech he gave in 1963, Kennedy said he was satisfied that the program had done what he designed it to do. In fact, Henry Luce’s Fortune Magazine criticized Kennedy’s specific approach with the Alliance as being too much economic interventionism and not enough military aid. (ibid, p. 84) Whereas Kennedy’s ideas were to maintain a government-to-government relationship, the IMF approach, especially under LBJ, accelerated into “private domination of resource markets and credit with the authority of the U. S. government.” (ibid)

    What shows Kennedy was genuine in his new approach was the fact that he put Dick Goodwin and Adolf Berle in charge of the new policy formation. Goodwin was a liberal Harvard lawyer, congressional investigator and speechwriter. Berle had been a member of the FDR Brain Trust, and was assistant secretary for Latin America from 1938-44. Berle was very much for moving economic development forward in the southern hemisphere. Goodwin asked for input from Latin American academics in Washington. (ibid, Schlesinger, p. 203)

    Kennedy himself attended the Punta del Este Conference launching the Alliance in Uruguay. Realizing the danger it represented to Castro, Che Guevara was there also. He said that, although Cuba was in sympathy with many of the aims of the program, Cuba would not take part in it. His rather moderate attack on the Alliance was evidence of its appeal. (ibid, p. 762) Kennedy placed Robert F. Woodward in charge of the program. Woodward was a lifetime diplomat who spent many years stationed in Latin America. Within one year, Kennedy funneled hundred of millions of dollars through the Alliance and into Latin America. Whether or not the Alliance was ultimately successful is an unfair question to ask. Since JFK was assassinated in 1963, and RFK left the government in 1964.

    To cite another Latin America example completely missed by Dallek: consider the case of the Dominican Republic. Dallek mentions the assassination of Rafael Trujillo and the subsequent coming to power of the military junta led by Joaquin Balgauer. He even mentions that Kennedy sent a small fleet to the area in order to prevent Trujillo’s brothers from resuming power. (An Unfinished Life, p. 468)But that is about it. From what I have written above, one can fairly conclude that Dallek does not want the reader to think that Kennedy actually tried to encourage democracy there.

    But he did. Liberal democrat Juan Bosch had been elected in late 1962. He was the first democratically elected president in the Dominican Republic in nearly four decades. But, in less than a year, he was overthrown by the military. Kennedy was furious. Within hours he ordered the suspension of economic aid and diplomatic relations to the new government. (Gibson, p. 78) He then encouraged other Latin American countries to do the same. Which they did. By mid-October the new junta was bitterly complaining about Kennedy’s interventionism and interference in internal affairs. A month later, Kennedy was assassinated and Bosch went into exile in Puerto Rico. But in 1965, he made a renewed effort to gain power. But President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Latin American assistant Thomas Mann decided to portray Bosch and his backers as communist threats to the hemisphere. Which they were not. But this created a pretext for an American invasion in April of 1965. The irony was that the Marines now opposed the same forces Kennedy had praised 18 months earlier as democratic and progressive. (Ibid, p. 79) This was another good example with which to demonstrate Kennedy’s interest in fostering progressive governments in the Third World. And to show the contrast between Kennedy’s cosmopolitan view of the world and Johnson’s much more catholic one. Apparently, Dallek did not think it was important to history.

    Let me add a discussion of one more topic Dallek deals with, this time on the domestic side: Kennedy’s economic policies. Like many other writers on the subject, Dallek deals with these in reviews of the steel crisis and the Kennedy/Heller request for a tax cut. And that is about it. Dallek does not even note the good performance of the economy under Kennedy, or the fact that he bequeathed very good circumstances to Lyndon Johnson. If you don’t mention those good indicators then you don’t have to explain why the economy improved under Kennedy.

    In his appointment of Douglas Dillon to Treasury, Kennedy was making the usual bow to Wall Street. But when he appointed his Council of Economic Advisers, no such bow was involved. The leader on that council was Walter Heller, one of the most noted Keynesian scholars of the age. Heller found Kennedy very interested in the economy, and the forces which drove it. Kennedy was determined to counter what he perceived as a downtrend in the economy by expanding “the Nation’s investment in physical and human resources, and in science and technology.” (Gibson, p. 20) Or, as Gibson notes in his long analysis of Kennedy’s economic program, “Kennedy consistently used his office in an attempt to inject growth-oriented planning into government policy.” (ibid, p. 21)

    After Kennedy’s death, Walter Heller explained the overall program he and Kennedy tried to construct. Kennedy was interested in both productivity and growth. Therefore, three months after taking office, he submitted a tax investment credit plan to congress. This allowed companies tax deductions in return for investing in new plant and equipment. (ibid, p. 21) But he restricted it. The credit was only available on new plant and equipment, with an expected life of six or more years, located in the United States. Kennedy was clear about why he was offering this program. He said it would increase profitability, output and productivity by cutting modernization costs. (ibid, p. 22) As Gibson notes, although most authors only discuss the income tax proposal, most of Kennedy’s tax programs contained this idea. Namely that the president would shape the decisions of those who controlled money and credit; shape them into a national plan encouraging growth.

    Please note: Kennedy only offered this deduction on investments inside the United States. Even though Kennedy was not around for the massive transfer of production and profits overseas – as we call it today, globalization – he and Heller anticipated the dangers it posed. At that time, the tax code encouraged American investment abroad by eliminating taxes on offshore profits. Kennedy singled this out as a tax deferral privilege. Kennedy proposed stopping this by taxing those profits each year even if they stayed outside the USA. He would only allow the deferral if the investment was made in the Third World or developing countries. And only for purposes of actual production, not licensing or tax escape purposes. (ibid, p. 22) Which is perfectly consistent with his foreign policy goals.

    Kennedy also wanted to eliminate tax breaks for companies set up as foreign investment entities. That is for sheer trade and speculative purposes. He and Heller also targeted rich individuals who were transferring wealth offshore to avoid paying estate taxes. (ibid) As the reader can see, Heller and Kennedy were going after those in the financial sector who were going outside the national boundaries to either create speculative enterprises or to dodge taxes.

    As part of his overall 1963 tax cut proposal, Kennedy had a section about large oil and gas producers who manipulated a 1954 law to gain advantages over smaller companies. He also wanted to alter foreign tax credits which allowed energy companies to avoid paying U.S. taxes. (ibid, p. 23)

    With all this, and more, in mind, Gibson has a different take on the 1962 steel crisis. To backtrack: Kennedy had made an arrangement between the steel corporations, unions, and the White House that prices and wages would stay at current levels in order to avoid an inflationary spiral. It was also meant to increase operating capacity. Since only 65% of that was in operation. Kennedy agreed to provide economic aid to cut down that high factor, thereby increasing employment. (ibid, p. 10) The work on this agreement went on for months. Contracts were signed by all the major companies in the field.

    Within days of the agreement being made, the president of U.S. Steel, Roger Blough, flew into Washington. He wanted a meeting with Kennedy. At that meeting, he handed Kennedy a memo saying that he would announce a price increase of 3.5% effective that evening. The press had already been alerted. It would become public within the hour. (ibid)

    Because of Blough’s in-your-face tactics, some authors have suggested this was not just a dispute about the steel industry’s bottom line. Kennedy had assigned several people on his staff, including Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, to run the complex negotiations. He had built up liaison with congress on the issue to attempt to funnel funding to crank up capacity. And after all this, contracts had been signed. As others, but not Dallek, have implied, Blough’s move seemed designed not just to break an agreement, but to humiliate Kennedy in public. Blough’s private audience lends even more credence to that scenario.

    As many have noted, the problem with the insistence on the price increase is that, in economic terms, it was unnecessary. The profits for the first quarter in the industry were among the best in history. And the predictions for the next year were even better. Further, the steel companies had paid out hundreds of millions in stock dividends each year for the past five years. (ibid, p. 12)

    Because of all these factors – which Dallek does not describe – some have guessed that the real reason for the direct challenge was to discredit Kennedy and his policies. In Blough’s eyes – and the eyes of others he was working with – Kennedy’s agreement reminded them of Roosevelt’s New Deal planning. Gibson also concludes that U. S. Steel did not like Kennedy’s investment tax proposal. Probably because it encouraged competition. (ibid, p. 11) In fact, Hubert Humphrey commented that Kennedy’s facedown of the companies helped pass his investment tax credit. (ibid, p. 15) What also suggests an ulterior motive is that the decision to challenge Kennedy was made several weeks before the labor agreements were signed. (ibid, p. 13) In fact, Kennedy himself once alluded that the attempt at discrediting his economic programs might have been the reason for the showdown. (ibid, p. 14)

    In May of 1962, in Fortune, it was theorized that Blough was not acting on his own. He was acting as an emissary for the business world to oppose Kennedy’s “jawboning for price controls”. Blough was trying to break through the “bland harmony that has recently prevailed between government and business.” For as the article notes, “If Blough wanted to create the greatest possible uproar and provoke maximum presidential reaction, his procedure was beautifully calculated.”

    None of this, not one iota, is in any of the two discussions of this key episode in either of Dallek’s books. Which indicates that, in almost every aspect, both of them are pedestrian and unrewarding. But really, that is being too kind to Dallek. As we have seen, like Larry Sabato, Dallek continually avoids information and circumstances which indicate Kennedy doing anything anti-status quo, or outside the realm of traditional anti-communism. The problem with this is that other authors – like Donald Gibson and John Newman – have demonstrated, with much evidence, that this was the case. To avoid this as rigorously as Dallek does is to write a book that is not really about John Kennedy. It’s really about the New York Times/Washington Post version of Kennedy. So it’s no surprise that both of those newspapers liked Dallek’s books. For me, there is more truth in the much less voluminous tomes of Ronald Rakove, Philip Muehlenbeck and Gibson than there is in the over 1,100 pages of Dallek’s drivel.

    At the end of my review of Betting on the Africans, I wrote that one book like that was worth five by Robert Dallek. After now analyzing both of Dallek’s books at length, I take that back. I was being too kind to Dallek. Muehlenbeck’s book is worth, not five, but ten by Dallek. In his books, Dallek gives new meaning to the term non-distinction.

  • The State of the JFK case: 50 Years Out

    What occurred at the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder was one of the most bizarre outbursts of controlled hysteria that the MSM has put on in years. Perhaps since its mad rush to protect the exposure of George W. Bush’s transparently phony excuses for invading Iraq. In fact, the basic underlying tension was evident everywhere. The most blatant example was the cordoning off of Dealey Plaza with 200 police officers. The public, and most of the media, both knew that what was being broadcast was false. But in order to fulfill their function as tribunes for the Establishment, the media was going to put their heads in the sand again.

    Another good example would be the Tom Brokaw/Gus Russo NBC special, Where Were You? This show interviewed several famous people about their initial reaction to the news President Kennedy was dead e.g. Jane Fonda, Steven Spielberg. But alas, if that is all the show had been about, Brokaw would not have needed Gus Russo. The big-name celebrities were there to pull in the ratings. The show made no bones about wanting to 1.) Reinforce the Warren Commission verdict that Oswald was the lone assassin, and 2.) insinuate fairly openly that all this residual affection the public has for Kennedy is misplaced. He really was not that good of a president. The ultimate proof of this was the interview done with film director Oliver Stone, the man who made JFK. His spot on the two-hour show ran about 15 seconds. Yet, when I talked to Stone about this program, he told me he was actually interviewed for about an hour. (Author interview with Stone, 12/20/2013.) The fact that almost all of this was cut shows that Brokaw and Russo had no intention of letting the other side have anything like equal time at this important point in the JFK assassination saga.

    What makes that undeniable element of MSM control so unbelievably bizarre today is this: There had been no change in the media’s attitude in this regard since 1964! To those old enough to recall, almost immediately after the Warren Report was issued, CBS News put together an evening special hosted by Walter Cronkite. Now, this program was broadcast within hours of the report being issued to President Johnson. In other words, neither Cronkite nor anyone else on his production staff had read the 26 volumes of supporting evidence, which would not be published until the next month.

    In 1967, due to the investigation by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, the CBS network launched another special program on the JFK case. This ended up being a four night special. It again ended up siding with the Warren Commission in every significant aspect. There was a story behind this that CBS did not want anyone to know about. After a similar 1975 special, CBS employee Roger Feinman began writing letters to the network’s Standards and Practices department about how Cronkite and Dan Rather had violated the company’s code of ethics in both the ’75 and 1967 programs. Executives at the company moved to terminate him, but Roger did not go quietly. In subsequent hearings he asked for certain documents that he knew existed since he heard of them through other employees.

    Those documents showed that producer Les Midgley had originally planned for a real and open debate between the Commission counsel and some of the more prominent critics of the report. [Some of this is described in a 2009 CTKA article – Ed.] He even wanted to spend one night interviewing witnesses the Commission had ignored. Then a panel of law school deans would decide the case. But as this proposal was passed up the corporate ladder to executives like CBS President Frank Stanton and News Chief Dick Salant, this idea became diluted. When the executives passed the proposal on to two northern California attorneys, Bayles Manning of Stanford, and corporate lawyer Edwin Huddleson, both of them cited the “political implications” and “the national interest” in shooting it down. Manning suggested that CBS ignore the critics, or even convene a panel to criticize their books. When Midgley persisted in critiquing the Commission, Salant did something behind his back. He showed his memo to former Commissioner John McCloy. McCloy now fired back a broadside at Midgley’s proposal. This was the beginning of Midgley becoming emasculated on the issue, and McCloy becoming an uncredited consultant on the program. Something CBS would keep secret. In fact, during Feinman’s dismissal proceeding, both McCloy and Stanton would deny this secret relationship.

    But some say, that was then. This is now. Surely with all the information that has surfaced in the intervening decades, the media would now grant the critics equal time. As Pat Speer showed in his valuable blog, “The Onslaught,” such was not the case. (Click here for that report) Not by a longshot. What is most disturbing today is that even alternative media, like PBS, now joined in the mass denial exercise. Online journalists who had a reputation for being mavericks, like Fred Kaplan also turned tail.

    What makes this all even more puzzling is the results of polls on the issue by first class professional Peter Hart. Done for the University of Virginia Center for Politics, the work of Hart essentially shows that, after decades of being pounded on this issue by both the MSM and the Establishment, the public still does not buy the official story. Either about the assassination, or about President Kennedy. A full 75% responded that they do not accept the Warren Commission verdict that Oswald acted alone. (Larry Sabato, The Kennedy Half Century, p. 416) That figure is stunning. Because since the last major poll by ABC in 2003, it has remained unchanged. Even though every aspect of the national media, has been unrelenting in their attempt to make the public believe the whole Commission propaganda tale about Oswald as the lone assassin. It hasn’t taken. But further, and perhaps even more stunning, Kennedy is, far and away, the most admired of the last nine presidents. (ibid, p. 406) Perhaps the most stunning number of all was this one: 91% said that Kennedy’s assassination altered the United States a “great deal.” The general reaction described by Hart was that a “deep depression set in across the country, and the optimism that had mainly prevailed since the end of World War II seemed to evaporate.” (ibid, p. 416) The respondents’ reactions when discussing President Kennedy were “eye-popping” to political scientist Sabato. Kennedy was perceived as “the polar opposite of the very unhappy views they have of the country today. Whereas contemporary America is polarized and divided, Kennedy represents unity and common purpose … as well as a sense of hope, possibility and optimism.” (ibid, p. 417) Brokaw and Russo tried to attack this image also in their tawdry special.

    So the question arises: Why is the country schizoid on this issue? Why does the Establishment and the MSM continue to hold these views of the Kennedy case, which the public simply does not believe, and have not since about 1966? What makes this even more puzzling now is the fact that the state of the evidence today is much more powerful with respect to the fact of conspiracy than it was back then in the sixties with Jim Garrison.

    II

    Due to the work of the Assassination Records Review Board, the database about the John F. Kennedy murder was greatly expanded. If one is talking only about sheer volume of paper, the document page count was doubled. But if one is talking about the actual knowledge base, the increase was much exponentially larger. Because as many people felt, what the government was hiding was of paramount importance. But secondly, the many authors who used these documents incorporated them with previous knowledge to create large advancements in the case. Some would call these quantum leaps.

    For instance, the ARRB finally declassified the HSCA’s Mexico City Report, commonly called the Lopez Report. Despite what Vincent Bugliosi has written, this legendary document has lived up to its reputation. The sheer quantity of information in the 400-page report was staggering. No one ever got inside a CIA operation – in this case the surveillance of the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City – the way that authors Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway did. But besides the sensational disclosures in that report, at Cyril Wecht’s recent Passing the Torch conference, we learned that the HSCA had prepared three indictments over their inquiry into Mexico City. There were two separate perjury charges for David Phillips, and one for Anne Goodpasture. One would have thought that this would have merited some kind of attention by the media during their three-week extravaganza over the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. In their attempt to reassert the Warren Commission, it was bypassed. Even though, the credibility of Phillips and Goodpasture are of the utmost importance to the Warren Commission’s story about Oswald in Mexico. For as Phillips himself later admitted, there is no evidence that Oswald ever visited the Soviet Embassy there. (Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 82)

    In fact, today, one can question each aspect of the original report assembled by the Warren Commission of Oswald’s supposed purpose and itinerary in Mexico City. To the point that one can argue whether or not Oswald was there at all. And if that is the case to any degree – even if Oswald was only impersonated at the two compounds – then it is highly unlikely that there could be any benign explanation for such a deception. Which is why Phillips and Goodpasture risked going to jail. Mexico City looms more importantly today than it ever did. (Read the summary of these discoveries.)

    The attempt to kill Kennedy in Chicago in early November was also ignored during the three-week exercise in denial. This is incredible. Because before the publication of Abraham Bolden’s The Echo from Dealey Plaza, and Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable, almost no one had done any real work on this very crucial topic. But thanks to the work of the ARRB and Douglass, Edwin Black’s exceptional 1976 report about Chicago was finally recovered and placed online. As Douglass pointed out, it is very hard to exaggerate the importance of both Black’s work, and the outline of the conspiracy in Chicago. Why? Because its outline unmistakably resembles the successful plot in Dallas. So much so that it is very hard to believe it could be a coincidence. If it is not, then it appears that the same forces that failed to kill Kennedy in Chicago, succeeded three weeks later. With a similar plan. Why would the MSM ignore such an important discovery dealing with the methodology of the crime?

    In another aspect, what we know about Oswald today, and his associations with the CIA and FBI, completely vitiates the paradigm the Warren Commission tried to sell to the public about him. Its quite clear now, as John Newman and Jefferson Morley have pointed out, that both intelligence agencies had much more information about Oswald than they ever admitted to in public. In fact, this began as soon as Oswald defected to Russia in 1959. At that time both the FBI and CIA began to keep files on Oswald. According to John Newman’s updated edition of his milestone book, Oswald and the CIA, counter-intelligence chief James Angleton was the man at the Agency who had access to all of the Oswald files. (Newman, p. 636) The fact that the CIA had so much paper on Oswald is something that the Agency had tried to conceal for three decades. One of these documents is quite tantalizing. Before Oswald returned from the USSR, the chief of the Soviet Russia division wrote, “It was partly out of the curiosity to learn if Oswald’s wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald’s own experiences in the USSR, that we showed operational intelligence interest in the Harvey (Oswald) story.” (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 150)

    Newman did much to rebuild this file on Oswald in his book and show what it revealed about who knew what about Oswald at both the FBI and CIA prior to the assassination. Along the way he revealed that the CIA and FBI had continually misrepresented what they knew about the man. This rebuilt file trail – which the Warren Report did not even approximate – raises the most compelling questions about Oswald, especially in conjunction with what happened in Mexico City. The surviving counsels of the Warren Commission have repeatedly said they saw these files. They most recently reiterated this antique plaint to Philip Shenon for his apologia, A Cruel and Shocking Act. Yet, none of those survivors, e.g. Howard Willens or David Slawson, has ever explained why they never noted the significance of this trail in the Warren Report. For example, why did the CIA not open a 201 file on Oswald until over a year after he defected? Why did it take over a month for the CIA to file its acknowledgement of Oswald’s defection? And then, when it did, why did it go to the wrong place at the Agency? (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 143-44)

    Today, the portrait we have of Oswald as an undercover intelligence agent is substantively more well-defined than when Philip Melanson published his important book on Oswald, Spy Saga, in 1990. This career began in the Marines with Oswald’s language training as part of the CIA’s fake defector program. (ibid, p. 139) To the KGB it was fairly obvious what he was up to in Russia. Therefore they shipped him out of Moscow and put up a security net around him in Minsk. (ibid, pgs. 145-46) After his return from Russia, he was working in New Orleans, out of Guy Banister’s office, as part of the Agency/Bureau attempt to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. That effort was being run on the Agency’s side by David Phillips and James McCord. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 155) Again, its truly remarkable that except for Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Killing Oswald, there was no serious attempt to deliver to the public any of this new information we have about the alleged assassin of President Kennedy during the 50th anniversary. ()

    The ARRB conducted a rather lengthy inquiry into the medical evidence in the JFK case. Today, this is one of the most controversial areas of evidence in the case. The official story, as first assembled by the Warren Commission, is today riddled with so many holes it simply cannot be taken seriously. That spurious tale was assembled mainly by Commission counsel Arlen Specter, with help from chief pathologist James Humes. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 119) It is clear from Shenon’s disgraceful book that he had help on it from the deceased Specter, and also Specter’s former co-author and collaborator, Charles Robbins. One of the worst parts of Shenon’s travesty is his failure to confront the problems with the autopsy in the Kennedy case. This surely must be the only autopsy in which the official story had the victim hit by two bullets – but yet neither of those two bullet tracks was dissected! And Specter never explained why this was not done in the Warren Report.

    Further, the Warren Report never explains the crucial difference between the witness reports about the hole in the back of Kennedy’s head and the failure of the autopsy photos to reveal this fact. Through the work of the ARRB we now know that the House Select Committee lied about this by saying this hole was not seen at Bethesda Medical Center, when in fact it was seen. The problem was, apparently no one took a photo depicting this wound. Probably because it would clearly suggest an exit wound. Which would mean Kennedy was hit from the front.

    Then there is the problem with Kennedy’s brain, perhaps the most important exhibit in the medical side of the case. Why was the brain not weighed the night of the autopsy? Why are there no photos of the brain sections in order to trace directionality? Why is there no written description of the sectioning process? Why did photographer John Stringer deny he took the official photos of this exhibit? And finally, if so many witnesses saw a brain with so much matter missing and damaged, why do the photos and Ida Dox drawing of the brain show pretty much an intact brain? (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 136-41) This problem is so inherent in the case that “Oswald did it” writers – like Shenon and Larry Sabato – talk about a severely damaged brain, without understanding that these statements vitiate the official story they are upholding. Again, the reader should ask himself, was any of this absolutely crucial evidence discussed during the anniversary extravaganza?

    Finally, as far as forensics goes, there are the questions surrounding the weapon and the ammunition. For many, many years the upholders of the official Commission mythology e.g. Tom Brokaw, would always maintain, that well, the rifle in evidence is the one that Lee Harvey Oswald ordered. Due to work by the late Ray Gallagher, and John Armstrong, this aspect of the case is also rendered dubious. In two respects. First, there are simply too many irregularities in the evidence trail of this rifle transaction – both in the mailing in of the money order, and in the sending and picking up of the rifle. Secondly, the rifle in evidence today is not the rifle the Commission says Oswald ordered. The Commission says Oswald ordered a 36-inch Mannlicher-Carcano carbine. The weapon in evidence is a 40.2 inch short rifle. The HSCA discovered that Klein’s Sporting Goods placed scopes on the carbine. But not the short rifle. Yet the rifle in evidence has a scope. Not only did the Warren Commission not answer this question. They never even outlined any of these problems. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 56-63)

    Then there is the shell evidence found at the alleged “sniper’s nest” on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. We now know that the photos found in the Commission volumes depicting these shells scattered in a haphazard way were staged. Police photographer Tom Alyea was the first civilian witness on the sixth floor. He states for the record that when he first arrived on the scene, the shells were spaced within the distance of a hand towel. They were then picked up and dropped by wither Captain Will Fritz or police photographer R. L. Studebaker. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 70) Which suggests that the police understood that for forensic photographic purposes the initial arrangement was not credible. It was too indicative of the shells being planted.

    What makes the shell evidence even worse is the condition of CE 543. This was the infamous dented shell. This exhibit cannot be explained away, and for multiple reasons. Unlike the other shells, it had markings on it indicating it had been loaded and extracted from a weapon three times before. The other shells did not have these markings on them. (ibid, p. 69) Further, of all the markings on this shell, only one links it to the rifle in evidence. And that mark comes from the magazine follower, which marks only the last shell in the clip. Yet, this was not the last shell since the clip contained a live round. This suggests that this shell had been previously fired from the rifle, it was recovered and then deposited on the sixth floor. (ibid)

    To further that thesis, as Josiah Thompson, the late Howard Donahue and British researcher Chris Mills have all shown, the dent on CE 543 could not have been made during normal usage. That is, from either falling to the floor or from ejection. Mills has demonstrated that this dent could have only originated during dry loading, that is with only the shell in the breech. (ibid) Finally in this regard, and also exculpatory of Oswald, there was never any evidence entered into the record that Oswald purchased any of the ammunition that was used in the assassination. The evidence trail the FBI did produce indicated he had not. (ibid)

    Finally, as we all know today, the evidence which the HSCA used as the “lynchpin” in its case against Oswald has now been thoroughly discredited. That would be the Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis, sometimes called Neutron Activation Analysis for bullet lead traces. That FBI procedure always had questions surrounding it. In fact, the first time it had been used was in the JFK case. Today, after the painstaking reviews by two professional teams of metallurgists and statisticians, it has been so vitiated that the FBI will never use it again in court. (ibid, pgs. 72-73) Unfortunately, that verdict came a bit late for Oswald.

    When approaching CE 399 today, the so-called Magic Bullet, one wonders how Warren Commission defenders can keep a straight face discussing it. All the desperate schemes used in the past decade on cable TV shows with their preposterous computer simulations and numerous trajectories all avoid the main point. And it is the similar problem that we have with CE 543. Today, the adduced evidence trail indicates that CE 399 was never fired in Dealey Plaza. The work of people like Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson, John Hunt, and Robert Harris, clearly indicates that CE 399 is, and always was, a plant.

    To quickly sum up this work, Aguilar and Thompson discovered that the FBI likely lied about showing CE 399 to the witnesses at Parkland Hospital, O. P. Wright and Darrell Tomlinson. Because the agent who was supposed to have done so, Bardwell Odum, said he never did. (ibid, p. 66) Secondly, Hunt discovered that the FBI lied again about this exhibit. The Bureau said that agent Elmer Lee Todd placed his initials on it. It turned out that Hunt discovered at the National Archives that Todd’s initials are not on it. (ibid, pgs. 224-26) But beyond that, Hunt also found out that, although the FBI was not in receipt of the magic bullet from the Secret Service until 8:45 on the evening of the assassination, the FBI lab had already checked in the “stretcher bullet” at 7: 30. Which indicates that either there were too many bullets and one was deep-sixed, or that someone later substituted the present CE 399 for another bullet. If the latter, that would jibe with Wright’s statement to Thompson in 1966 that the bullet in evidence today is not the bullet he gave to the Secret Service. Finally, Robert Harris has noted with quite compelling evidence, from witnesses like Henry Wade, that a separate bullet fell out of Governor John Connally’s body and was picked up by a nurse.. The FBI then covered this up, realizing it would create problems since this bullet was supposed to have been found on an empty stretcher. (ibid, p. 67)

    As noted above, all this new evidence strongly indicates that there never was any Magic Bullet trajectory through Connally and Kennedy. Just as there never was any miraculous minimal loss of mass from the bullet. For the simple reason that bullet was never fired in Dealey Plaza. In fact, all this so-called “hard evidence” is clearly so suspect today that it does not deserve to be seriously considered. Because in a real court of law, with adequate defense counsels employed, it would all be skewered and roasted like hot dogs on a griddle. And without this evidence, where is the case against Oswald?

    III

    The above is the actual state of the evidence today in the JFK case. There is such a split between the above and what was broadcast and printed for the 50th anniversary that it seems that America is divided up into two countries: a reality based one and a mythological one. The MSM is clearly in the latter. But a veteran newsman like Tom Brokaw is smart enough to employ people like Gus Russo to help him navigate through the ponderous and complex evidence trail. They know people like Russo will keep them from stumbling, however accidentally, onto the truth. After all, that is what Gus Russo gets paid to do these days.

    And this, as well as the above, shows a rather disturbing conclusion about the Kennedy case. Which is that even today, fifty years after the fact, there has never been a real investigation done of it by either the federal government of any MSM outlet. Today we know that the Warren Commission was a haphazard body at best. Most of the staff quit before the investigation was completed. Howard Willens then hired assistants that were barely out of law school, with no experience in criminal cases, to finish writing the document.

    But even before that, we know today that the FBI investigation was severely compromised. Even before Nicolas Katzenbach typed his memorandum about satisfying the public that Oswald was the lone assassin and he had no accomplice, J. Edgar Hoover had expressed similar aims the day before, on November 24th. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 252-53) But, as we have seen from above, Hoover actually was in a position to falsify the evidentiary record. And he did. We know this not just from the sorry chain of evidence, but also from people in the FBI who talked about the alterations later. This includes agents and employees like Harry Whidbee, William Walter, and most recently, Don Adams. Adams is especially interesting in that he was stationed in Dallas in the summer of 1964 while the FBI inquiry was still ongoing. He had an opportunity to see the Zapruder film with two other agents. Afterwards, he told them it was clear that Kennedy was hit from two different directions. They replied that they were aware of that but Hoover did not want them to go down that path. So they would not. (Ibid, p. 221) Since the Commission was overwhelmingly reliant on the FBI for their information, the Warren Report was doomed to be a counterfeit inquiry from the start.

    Most people today know what happened to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. It began as a promising, open-ended inquiry into the case led by two veteran criminal prosecutors, Richard Sprague and Robert Tanenbaum. When the MSM saw this was going to be a real criminal inquiry, which would expose the fallacies of the Warren Commission, they began to attack, and eventually derailed, the committee. Both Sprague and Tanenbaum then resigned. The handwriting was now on the wall for the new chief counsel Robert Blakey. And he ran a much more controlled operation. In its published volumes we know that the HSCA never really challenged the crime scene evidence noted above. When the Assassination Records Review Board declassified its working papers we discovered that the HSCA was even worse than we imaginedsince it knowingly lied and manipulated evidence e.g. about the location of the wound in Kennedy’s back, about the Zapruder frame where Kennedy was first hit, and, as described above, also about the condition of the back of Kennedy’s head.

    What we know today would indicate that, if anything, the first generation of critics on the JFK case did not go far enough. They erred in accepting pieces of evidence like Oswald ordering the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, and that Oswald had been in Mexico City. Things like this were allowed to enter the record for the simple reason that the Warren Commission never obeyed any kind of rules of evidence or the adversarial legal procedure. Which is startling since the body was overwhelmingly made up of attorneys, including the Chief Justice of the United States. And Earl Warren was primarily responsible for advocating for the rights of the accused to have sufficient counsel so that justice would not be denied to them. But in this case, Oswald was never represented by any counsel. As far as being a fact-finding commission, the HSCA criticized the performance of those duties by the Commission in no uncertain terms. (See especially Volume11 of the HSCA volumes.) In fact, every attorney who has looked into this case in any official capacity since 1964 has nothing but disdain for the work done by the Commission. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 315) The fact that almost none of this coruscating criticism was aired during he MSM’s three week media blitz shows how deep the denial runs.

    In fact, it has become so bad that two staples of the Commission’s fraudulent case – Ruth Paine and Wesley Frazier – resurrected themselves for the occasion. They were revived, resuscitated and polished, as if there were no questions to be asked about their bona fides. When , in fact, in keeping with the mass ritual of denial, there were literally dozens of pointed questions that should have been posed to these two witnesses. But just like the prospective indictments of Phillips and Goodpasture, the MSM put up a sign saying, “Stop! Don’t go there!”

    The irony in all this is that the head in the sand attitude perfectly exemplifies the attitude of the MSM in “going down with the ship”. We all know today that the MSM is dying. Newsweek recently sold for a pittance. As Jefferson Morley revealed at the Passing the Torch conference in Pittsburgh, he tried to get the Washington Post to cover the Kennedy case repeatedly. They refused. Even though as he noted, their circulation numbers continued to decline. The Post was recently sold to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com for the shockingly low price of 250 million dollars. The LA Times has also declined radically in circulation from a peak of 1.1 million to almost half of that today. The LA Times was purchased by Tribune Company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2008. There have been numerous reports about the precarious financial position of the New York Times. One of the problems of course has been a loss of readers to the Internet. Not just because it’s mostly free, but also because it offers a wider variety of information. For example, this year, CTKA.net broke all of its records for readership, with over 3.5 million hits. Much of this was aided by the blackout by the MSM in November. But the MSM still does not get the message. Not only does hardly anyone else believe them anymore on this and related subjects, but with the competition from the web, they are now on the endangered species list as financial entities.

    But that doesn’t appear to matter to them. That is how wedded they are to the Commission’s follies. Even when all the new evidence indicates they are wrong, they ignore it. In fact, as we saw with the case of Mayor Mike Rawlings in Dallas, he and the Power Elite did not even want to hear anything about it. Even if it meant violating the first amendment rights of American citizens.

    That is the state of the JFK case today. There is more evidence now of what really happened than there has ever been. The problem is that the general public is not aware of it. Because the MSM refuses to countenance it. Even if it is to the detriment of themselves, this country, and democracy. The MSM and the Power Elite continue to deny it all. That death wish, of course, says much more about them than it does the Kennedy assassination.

  • Larry Sabato, The Kennedy Half Century

    There are two important short sections in The Kennedy Half Century. One occurs at the beginning, the other near the end.

    The author, Professor Larry Sabato, works out of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. In his acknowledgements section, Sabato traces his financial backing for this project over the five-year gestation time of the book. Some of his backers include: the Reynolds Foundation, McGuireWoods Consulting, the Hobby Family Foundation, the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth, and the president and provost of University of Virginia. It’s with this kind of backing that Sabato was able to do the polling and focus group interviews he did for the volume. Which, to me, is far and away the most valuable part of the tome. His description of these polling results begins on page 406 of the book’s 427 pages of text.

    Like the polling cited by Robert Dallek in Camelot’s Court, Sabato’s polling – through the well-respected Hart Research Associates in Washington – discovered that, of the last nine presidents, Kennedy is the most admired. This is remarkable since that time period includes men like Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan, all of whom served two full terms. Therefore, they had a much longer time period to both pass legislation and plant their imprint on the national consciousness. And again, as with Dallek, the margin by which Kennedy outpaced the others was not really close. (Sabato, p. 406) Further, a remarkable 78% said that Kennedy’s presidency had a profound impact on the United States. When asked to name four lasting achievements of the JFK presidency, two of the four most named issues dealt with civil rights for black Americans (ibid, p. 412). The other two were the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Apollo mission.

    Sabato then details what are probably the two most politically charged findings in his polling. An amazing 91% of the respondents said that Kennedy’s murder changed the United Sates a “great deal”. (p. 416) Which is a number so astronomically high that it surprised even this writer. The general reaction described was that a “deep depression set in across the country , as the optimism that had mainly prevailed since the end of World War II seemed to evaporate” (ibid). The final result affirmed what had been, more or less, a constant in the polling since about 1967 and the publicity surrounding the Jim Garrison investigation. A full 75% of the public “reject the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone” (ibid). As Sabato notes this is the same percentage that ABC News polled back in 2003 on the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

    That is significant in and of itself. Why? Because of what has happened in the intervening decade. There has been a steady stream of cable produced television specials – using the same phony methodology of the 2003 Peter Jennings/Gus Russo/Dale Myers fiasco called Beyond Conspiracy – which have tried to use computer simulations to make the impossible Single Bullet Theory palatable. Many of these execrable programs have been aired on Discovery Channel. Several of them have used the auspices of the Sixth Floor Museum. And some of the very worst have used Sixth Floor employee Gary Mack as either a consultant or a host. Like Dale Myers did, many of these programs have actually altered evidence to make the Magic Bullet possible. (CTKA provided one of many exposes on the infamous Myers.) But miraculously, in the face of this incessant drumbeat of propaganda, the American public has said no, we don’t buy the computer simulations. As they say in the tech business, its all GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.

    Sabato ends this polling chapter with a summary of Kennedy’s presidency in the following terms. Sabato writes that it was “eye-popping to see and hear the terms of endearment lavished on John Kennedy.” He then writes that Kennedy’s presidency is perceived as “the polar opposite of the very unhappy views they have of the country today. Whereas contemporary America is polarized and divided, Kennedy represents unity and common purpose … as well as a sense of hope, possibility and optimism.” (Sabato, p. 417)

    These are quite significant findings. And Sabato is to be congratulated for making them public and employing such a venerated pollster as Peter Hart to attain them. To me, they just about certify all the things that the critical community has been saying about the significance of the Kennedy assassination in the collective unconscious of the American psyche. His murder really was an unprecedented shock to the system. And the fact that Kennedy was perceived as such a breath of fresh air, this made it all the worse as to its impact. This community can certainly cite these results as evidence that our perception of the JFK murder is the right one.

    II

    Unfortunately, that is about as far as the kudos go for this book. The rest of the volume is so inferior that it’s almost like Sabato wrote the rest to counteract the results of the polling. Because much of the rest of the work is arranged around two themes. First, JFK really does not deserve all the admiration the public has for him. Second, although the Warren Commission might have made some errors, they got the bottom line correct: Oswald really did kill President Kennedy. Of course, these two concepts were the major ideas behind much of the programming and many of the books released around the 50th anniversary. Therefore, Sabato’s tome is symptomatic of the much larger MSM and Establishment cultural barrage that took hold of the country in preparation for that event.

    A good example would be the Tom Brokaw/Gus Russo NBC special which was supposed to be made up of personal reminisces of famous people about November 22, 1963. That turned out to be only a pretext to hook the viewer. The actual program, entitled Where Were You, had the same aims as Sabato’s book. Its true agenda was to deceive the public about who actually killed President Kennedy, and to try and demean his presidency so people would not think any kind of legacy was worth honoring about the man. What else could the show have been about with Brokaw hosting it and Gus Russo as the consultant? Both men have been doing those same things for the last 20 years.

    And so with Sabato. According to some CTKA sources at the University of Virginia, Sabato has always strived to get media attention for his Center for Politics. He likes being in front of cameras, no matter what the occasion. He has a rather liberal backing for money for his Center. But, as Mike Swanson notes in the accompanying article, he also knows how to get on television. He knows what feeds the beast of the MSM. Therefore, so as not to seem as big a denialist and cover-up artist as Philip Shenon, he spent some time with Virginia lawyer Dan Alcorn. Alcorn is well versed in the literature of the JFK case. Alcorn knows the many problems with the official story. And he was not shy about telling Sabato about them. Therefore, unlike Shenon, who only spoke to people like Commission lawyer Howard Willens, and took everything Willens said at face value, Sabato displays a bit of sophistication. Not a lot, but a bit. From his polling, he understands that the much larger part of the public does not buy the Warren Commission as any kind of serious fact finding entity. Today, that is simply a dog that will not hunt. Therefore, unlike the preposterous Shenon, he gives some space to some of the problems with the evidence in the JFK case.

    There are really three parts to The Kennedy Half Century. There is a discussion of Kennedy’s path to the presidency and what he did in office. Then, there is a discussion of what happened in Dallas and the evidence for and against the Warren Commission verdict. And third, there is a discussion about how the shadow of JFK and the Kennedy family has been cast over subsequent presidents.

    As we deal with these three parts, it is important to keep in mind the following facts. Sabato is not a historian. He is a political scientist. And one who is very much in tune with the demands of the MSM. Further, he offered an online course about President Kennedy as a lead up to the release of his book. In the syllabus to that course, he listed a wide variety of sources for the student to read. That list revealed he was aware of the good work which has actually broadened our perspectives on who Kennedy was. One of the things that make his book odd is that, in light of that fact, it is striking that his book has no bibliography. One has to go through his long footnotes section – which often includes more text – to find out his basis for the information in the book. Which is what this reviewer, quite laboriously, did.

    As we shall see, there seems to have been a reason for the author to make this odd choice. Because Sabato was selective about the actual texts he used in writing the book. If one compares the volumes he listed for his online course, versus what he used for his book, Sabato appears to have selectively pruned from the former in order to produce a much more MSM friendly product. This made for good public relations for Sabato. Unfortunately, it does not make for good history, or for good scholarship.

    III

    Sabato begins his narrative with Kennedy’s trip to Texas in November of 1963. He traces that through to the arrival in Dallas, the shooting in Dealey Plaza, the trip to Parkland Hospital afterwards, and the actual autopsy at Bethesda Medical Center than night. From here he then launches into a retrospective of Kennedy’s political career from about 1956 to 1963. All this takes up about the first 45 pages of the book. And just from reading that far one begins to see that Sabato has an agenda. For instance, there is no mention in the entire text of State Department official Edmund Gullion. Considering the fact that Sabato is a political scientist, that lack is a bit startling. Even Thurston Clarke understood the importance of Kennedy’s meeting with Gullion in Saigon in 1951, and how that meeting changed Kennedy’s consciousness about communism and the Third World. As many authors today have shown, it was this meeting that then caused Kennedy to make several speeches mapping out his differences with Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers. Especially on how hard the United States should press developing countries on being for us or against us on the issue of being non-aligned between east and west during the Cold War. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 21-24)

    In his further attempt to diminish Kennedy, Sabato gives short shrift to the striking speech Kennedy made in 1957 about the French/Algerian colonial conflict. In fact, he deals with it in about one page. (Sabato, pgs. 42-43) Incredibly, he gives over to John Foster Dulles more space for his critique of the speech than he does to Kennedy’s actual speech! And he badly underplays the opposition to the speech itself. Not just from the Republicans, but also from Democrats like Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson. (DiEugenio, p. 26) The opposition of Stevenson is important politically since he was considered in the forefront of the liberal section of the Democratic Party. Further, Sabato never mentions that the vast majority of newspaper editorials lined up against Kennedy on the issue. But finally, by not reproducing the actual text of the speech, Sabato avoids mentioning the most powerful part of the address. One which Kennedy made quite explicit. He was comparing what the United States and France had done in Vietnam with what was now happening in Algeria. By allying itself with a European colonial power, America was playing on the wrong side of history.

    Why does Sabato do this tailoring? Because he wants to divorce Kennedy from being a liberal icon. He adds that young people today associate the Kennedy name with liberalism. He writes that it was really the post 1963 Robert Kennedy, and younger brother Teddy “who transformed the family name’s ideology …” (Sabato, p. 41) Well, if you cut out Gullion, eliminate Kennedy’s speeches opposing the Dulles brothers’ foreign policy, excise his interest in the Third World, and significantly curtail his milestone Algeria speech, then yep, you can somehow proffer Kennedy as some kind of a moderate. But that is not writing history. It is practicing a political agenda. It is not scholarship. It is in Edward Luttwak’s phrase, “renting a scholar”.

    The other main way that Sabato tries to denude Kennedy’s liberalism here is through another method, one which has been utilized by a queer combination of the regressive right and loopy left. This hoary complaint says that, somehow, President Kennedy was not really concerned about civil rights for black Americans as a senator. He then moved at a glacial pace on the issue once in the White House. I was really sorry to see that Sabato had enlisted in this kind of Fox News distortion of history. But since he does, let us correct the record.

    There are three good books on this subject. They are Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes by journalist and author Harry Golden, Of Kennedys and Kings by former senator and Kennedy advisor Harris Wofford, and the classic Promises Kept by the late UCLA professor Irving Bernstein. (It is important to this discussion that I could find no reference to either the first or last book in Sabato’s footnotes.) As many on the right note, Senator Kennedy lined up against most liberals in his party on the processing of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. They did not want the House bill to go the Judiciary Committee. Because it was headed by staunch segregationist James Eastland of Mississippi.

    Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was so apathetic about it that he did not back this move. Kennedy was against it. Not because he was against the overall goal. But because he thought it would create a dangerous precedent in the Senate. One that could be used against liberal Democrats in the future struggle for progressive causes. (Golden, p. 94) Kennedy felt that, if needed, the Democrats could use a discharge petition to yank the bill out of committee and onto the floor for a vote.

    Unlike Fox News, Sabato does not further the myth that Kennedy voted against the act. (That myth has been exposed.) On the procedural question, Kennedy wrote a strongly worded letter to a constituent on the point. He wrote that, “I would be the first to sign a discharge petition to bring the civil rights bill to the floor.” (Letter from Kennedy to Alfred Jarrette, August 1, 1957) Kennedy then added that, “I have fought long and consistently for a good civil rights bill. I was one of only 38 senators who voted to retain Title III in the present bill, the section which would extend civil rights to areas other than voting privileges” (ibid).

    To his credit, Sabato does note Kennedy’s support for Title III. (Sabato, p. 42) But he does not explain why this was so important. That part of the act allowed the Attorney General to step in almost unilaterally in cases of, not just voting discrimination, but also school desegregation. And it allowed the use of civil actions, which could hurt municipalities in the treasury. This was clearly the most far-ranging clause in the bill. And Kennedy was one of its most ardent proponents. Because now, finally, the federal government could intercede inside the obstructionist state governments. And contrary to what Sabato writes, Kennedy trumpeted Title III at the expense of political capital. Many commentators have noted that Kennedy’s outspoken stance about this aspect of the bill is what began to erode his support in the south. (Golden, p. 95)

    In a practical way, what was so important about this as far as civil rights were concerned? Because once Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, the Kennedy brothers began to use that clause in a much more widespread way than Eisenhower ever imagined. But, in keeping with his agenda, Sabato does not tell you this part of the story. On the day Robert Kennedy was confirmed by the senate, Eastland reminded him, “Your predecessor never brought a civil rights case in Mississippi.” (ibid, p. 100) This was true. Eisenhower only used the Title III clause ten times in three years. And two of those cases were filed on the last day of his administration. (ibid, p. 104) The day after Bobby Kennedy was approved, in response to Eastland’s reminder, President Kennedy told his brother, “Get the road maps – and go!” (ibid, p. 100) In other words, start sending investigators into the backwoods of the south and start filing cases.

    RFK did just that. In one year, he doubled the number of lawyers in the civil rights section of the department. At the same time he more than doubled the amount of cases Eisenhower had filed. By 1963, the number of lawyers had been nearly quintupled. (ibid, 105) The Attorney General also hired 18 legal interns to search microfilm records for discrepancies in voting statistics in suspect districts. This allowed him to open files on 61 new investigations. That remarkable number was achieved in just one year. (Ibid, p. 105) This had been a preplanned strategy by JFK. In October of 1960, at a meeting of his civil rights campaign advisory board, Kennedy told them this was the method he had decided upon to break the back of voting discrimination in the south. (ibid, p. 139)

    These facts blow up the myth that Sabato is trying to propagate about Kennedy and civil rights. But let us go further in order to show just how agenda-driven the author really is.

    When Kennedy became president, it was clear that neither the Brown vs. Board decision of 1954, nor the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 were having any strong effect in increasing the black vote in the south. The eight states with the lowest turnout figures in the 1960 election were all in the south. It was obvious that even with those three laws on the books, Eisenhower’s enforcement of them was so lacking in rigor that the southern states felt no real compunction to obey them. And clearly, Eisenhower and Nixon had given those state governments a nod and a wink in this regard. For instance, in 1956 Eisenhower had told a reporter that the Brown vs. Board decision had set back progress in the south at least 15 years. (John Emmet Hughes, The Ordeal of Power, pgs. 200-01) Vice-President Nixon echoed this attitude. He said, “… if the law goes further than public opinion can be brought along to support at a particular time, it may prove to do more harm than good.” (Golden, p. 61)

    This was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The law was not going to go very far because, in fact, it was not being supported to any real degree. This created entrenched resistance to a piecemeal approach. In other words, it might take several years to challenge each district in court. What the Kennedys did next was to try and bypass going district by district in their legal actions. They now decided to collect data on whole states to present in court. This is how President Kennedy took on Eastland’s home state in the case of United States vs. Mississippi. President Kennedy was pleased with the approach. Across the Justice Department’s 1962 report, he scrawled “Keep pushing the cases.” (Golden, p. 111)

    President Kennedy was also sensitive about the lack of black Americans employed in branches of government, including the armed services. Therefore, he appointed the illustrious civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the federal bench in 1961. Through Abraham Bolden we know he didn’t like the fact that there were no black Americans on the White House Secret Service detail. On his inauguration day, he commented to Lyndon Johnson that there were no black Americans in the Coast Guard marching detail. That evening he learned that there had never been a black student at the Coast Guard Academy. This was remedied in 1962. (Bernstein, p. 52) At one of the first Cabinet meetings he noted that there were only ten African American lawyers employed by the federal government. That figure went up by a factor of seven in six months. (Golden, pgs. 114-15)

    In March of 1961, just two months after being inaugurated, Kennedy first proposed an executive order decreeing there would be no racial discrimination in hiring by contractors working for the federal government. This was signed into law nine months later. In two years, 1700 complaints were heard. Over 70% of the cases ended with the employer being disciplined. Under Eisenhower, only six such suits were ever brought. (Golden, p. 60)

    But Kennedy went further. He got 100 large private corporations to sign onto this agreement voluntarily. He also got 117 labor unions to pledge they would fight for the cause and report hiring discrimination on the job. He then ordered the Labor Department to investigate discrimination in apprenticeship and training programs. (ibid) This attitude, as opposed to the implicit acceptance of the status quo by Eisenhower and Nixon, encouraged thousands of complaints to be filed.

    As a result, by 1963 in South Carolina, black Americans were – for the first time – working alongside whites in advanced positions in textile mills. The superintendent explained it in practical economic terms: if the black Americans were not hired, the company would lose government contracts. If that happened, they would have to close their doors. (Helen Fuller, Year of Trial, p. 131) Again, these kinds of acts cost Kennedy plenty of votes in the south. It hurt him because, unlike with Eisenhower, he actually spoke about the problem and then acted independently of the Supreme Court. With Eisenhower and the Little Rock crisis, commentators could blame the federal intervention on Earl Warren. That was not the case with Kennedy and his new measures. Especially since, on May 6, 1961, Robert Kennedy spoke at the University of Georgia’s Law Day. There he announced that, unlike Eisenhower, he would vigorously pursue the implementation of the Brown vs. Board decision.

    Like others, Sabato criticizes Kennedy for not issuing an executive order on housing as he did on employment until two years after his election. (Sabato , p. 111) As Fuller made clear in her book, this was because Kennedy thoroughly understood that if he signed it earlier, he could never attain other pieces of legislation that were important to him. The entrenched southern power barons in congress would retaliate. (Fuller, pgs. 37-42) In fact, after he signed the housing bill, Senators John Stennis and Richard Russell voted against his test ban treaty. Another example of this occurred when Kennedy tried to create a new cabinet department, Housing and Urban Development. He announced that African American Robert Weaver would be the Secretary for the new department. The House Rules Committee then rejected the proposal. (Golden, p. 121) These were very real concerns that Kennedy rightfully anticipated.

    Robert Kennedy sent a progress report each week to his brother about the court actions in his voting rights cases. At the end of 1962, he told the president it would be all over by 1968. (ibid, p. 131) But something else happened in the meantime. By getting out in front of the issue, and by signing two important executive orders (on employment and housing) President Kennedy was fulfilling the symbolic agreement he had made in the 1960 campaign. This was when he and his brother intervened in the Georgia jail case of Martin Luther King. An incident which Sabato spends about eight words on. (Sabato, p. 70) Through their intervention, King was released from some trumped up charges.

    By openly allying himself with King, Kennedy was giving the civil rights movement ballast and hope. After he won the White House, this encouraged the movement leaders to become more active under his presidency than they had ever been before. So now a certain synergy entered into the equation. Something that would not have happened under Eisenhower and Nixon. In fact, Harris Wofford had written a memo to Kennedy in December of 1960 stating the major problem with civil rights had been the fact that there had been no real leadership in the executive branch or congress to supplement the work of the courts.

    In that memo, Wofford essentially mapped out the path Kennedy should take. He said that in 1961 there did not seem to be any way to get a real omnibus civil rights law through the senate because of the almost guaranteed filibuster by the southerners. Wofford proposed changing the cloture rules on filibuster to circumvent that tactic. Which is something that Kennedy had mentioned in his above referenced 1957 letter to Alfred Jarrette. In the meantime, Wofford proposed that Kennedy use executive actions to advance the cause.

    Kennedy immediately did so by shifting the balance of power on the Commission on Civil Rights. This was a body set up by the 1957 Civil Rights Act. It had the power to launch investigations, hold hearings and make recommendations as far as exposing discriminatory laws went. Eisenhower had made it a rather moderate agency. He manned it with two integrationists, two segregationists, and two middle of the roaders. In March of 1961, Kennedy had an opportunity to make two new appointments. In doing so he tilted the balance toward the integrationists. He furthered this aim by also naming a staff director who was also an integrationist. (Bernstein, pgs. 50-51)

    Kennedy also urged a kind of affirmative action program for all the cabinet level departments. He wanted figures on how many black Americans were employed by each department secretary. When the numbers were returned, he made it clear they were not nearly satisfactory. This sent each secretary scrambling to find suitable black employees in order not to be dressed down by the president at the next meeting. (ibid, p. 53) Kennedy also made it clear that he would not attend functions at any institution that practiced segregation. This created a wave of resignations by White House employees from such places like athletic clubs and golf courses. (ibid)

    It was against this drastically new backdrop that the civil rights movement now began to truly assert itself e.g. the Freedom Riders, King’s SCLC, James Farmer’s CORE. For instance, James Meredith sent away for his application to the University of Mississippi the day after Kennedy was inaugurated. (Bernstein, p. 76) For as Wofford and Bernstein have written, there was never any doubt that Kennedy would support these groups. (Ibid, p. 65) In fact, the White House arranged financing in some cases for them to launch voter registration drives. It was simply a matter of what tactics would be used. But there was a byproduct to these dramatic confrontations e.g. Nicolas Katzenbach removing George Wallace from the front gate at the University of Alabama, President Kennedy calling out the military to quell the violence over Meredith at Ole Miss, Robert Kennedy ordering 500 marshals into Montgomery to protect the Freedom Riders. That was this: the more these ugly confrontations were televised, the more people outside the south became repelled by the actions of the white southerners. In other words, through television, the incidents had a dual effect: the spectacles began to turn people who had previously been apathetic on the subject into civil rights advocates. In turn, this began to isolate the segregationists of the south. Through that double movement, the balance of power began to shift in congress away from Eastland and toward Kennedy and King.

    As Wofford, Robert Kennedy and Bernstein have all noted, the culminating showdown was in Birmingham, Alabama. With a black population of forty per cent, it was probably the most segregated big city in the south. For example, although it was industrialized, less than five per cent of the Hayes Aircraft workforce was black. (ibid, p. 85) The symbol of Birmingham’s unstinting fealty to segregation was Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor. Connor was so defiant in the face of Bobby Kennedy’s attempts to integrate the south that he called him a “bobby-soxer” and challenged him to a fistfight. (ibid, p. 86) Because of these factors, the city was a prime target for demonstrations. King had an executive meeting of the SCLC in January of 1963 to plan the assault on Birmingham.

    As everyone knows, Connor played into the hands of Kennedy and King. The images captured by TV cameras of Connor unleashing savage police attack dogs, and using powerful fire department hoses against young boys and girls, these were a media sensation. Birmingham became the magazine, newspaper and television capital of America. President Kennedy sent Burke Marshall, head of the civil rights division, to negotiate an agreement to end the violence. Both King and Robert Kennedy called the agreement a great victory. (Bernstein, p. 92)

    Comedian/activist Dick Gregory had been in Birmingham from the beginning. On the night after Connor unleashed the German Shepherds and hoses, he returned home. His wife was waiting for him when he arrived after midnight. She told him that President Kennedy had called. He had left a message that he wanted Gregory to call him when he got in. Gregory noted the late hour. His wife replied with, “He said it didn’t matter what time it was.” So Gregory called the White House and Kennedy picked up the phone. He said, “Dick, I need to know everything that happened down there.” Gregory went on for about 10 minutes detailing the whole sorry spectacle. When he was done, Kennedy exclaimed, “We’ve got those bastards now!” Gregory, overcome with emotion, began to weep. (2003 radio interview with Gregory)

    After this, Kennedy now wrote his civil rights act, made his memorable national speech the night Medgar Evers was murdered, and supervised – and supplemented with white union members – King’s March on Washington. For all intents and purposes the battle had been won. Because as Kennedy predicted in November of 1963, and as Thurston Clarke proved in his book, the civil rights act was going to pass the next year. As both Johnson and Kennedy understood, the key in the senate was Everett Dirksen, who JFK had good relations with.

    Now, anyone looking at the above précis would have to conclude the obvious: Kennedy did more for the civil rights of black Americans in three years than the previous 18 presidents had done in a century. That includes Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt and the so-called progressive presidents: Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt and Taft. Sabato, of course, is aware of all this. But because of his agenda, he can’t admit it. In fact, you will see little, if any, of the above in The Kennedy Half Century. Even though it is accepted history. To be frank, I am a little disturbed that I had to dust off my books and consult them to correct Sabato’s Orwellian attempt to turn Kennedy into the equivalent of a Tennessee congressman on civil rights. It’s a similar trick to what Tom Brokaw and Gus Russo did for their tacky TV special. But this is what happens when one deals with the politically charged Kennedy case. It’s simply not enough to distort the facts of his assassination. The attempt at abridgement extends out from his murder, and into his presidency.

    IV

    As noted, like Robert Dallek, Sabato is intent on denuding Kennedy’s presidency of any real value. So in addition to his misrepresentations on civil rights, the author also goes after the idea that Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his death. It’s hard to believe that this could be seriously contemplated at this time. But as with Kennedy’s civil rights record, Sabato is not above distorting and simply eliminating aspects of the adduced record in order to achieve his aim. The author is nothing if not Machiavellian.

    Sabato begins his discussion of this issue with a usual ploy used by the likes of Chris Mathews. He tries to make the Vietnam issue something ideological. In two ways. He says that liberals have forgotten all the aid the USA gave to Ngo Dien Diem in the way of military hardware, like Green Berets, guns and money. (Sabato, p. 123) That whole concept is simply bogus. All of this material about Kennedy’s approval of military aid to Diem in late 1961 is thoroughly detailed in John Newman’s masterly book JFK and Vietnam. That book was published over 20 years ago. It is a book that many so-called “liberals” use. But Newman is a conservative. Which should demonstrate to everyone but Sabato that people on both sides of the ideological compass can try to seek the truth of a situation when there is no agenda driving them.

    The other ideological strophe he uses is a real dandy. He writes that, “Eisenhower had been wary of American involvement in Vietnam, having watched the French get bogged down in Southeast Asia and then withdraw in humiliation in 1954” (ibid). For sheer and utter nonsense, for the utter perversity prize in a book that is full of it, this sentence might take the cake. Sabato can only get away with such baloney because, as noted at the top of Section 3 of this review, he leaves out all the important things in the story pertaining to Kennedy ‘s visit to Vietnam in 1951, his meeting with Edmund Gullion, his altered consciousness about the Third World, and most of all, Operation Vulture. This was the proposed atomic bombardment of Dien Bien Phu by the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower. I don’t see how seriously considering the use of an American air armada to deliver nuclear weapons in order to preserve the last vestiges of European colonial empire qualifies Eisenhower as being “wary of American involvement in Vietnam.” In fact, it’s just the opposite of what Sabato implies. It was Kennedy who protested in public this frightening nightmare scenario of dropping three atomic bombs over a country the USA not even formally at war with.

    And make no mistake about just how wrong Sabato is here. Because it was not just in aid of France that Eisenhower was willing to take the final step towards nuclear holocaust. For as Gordon Goldstein notes in his fine book, Lessons in Disaster, President Johnson derived much succor from the fact that Eisenhower supported his escalation in Vietnam each step of the way. Up to and including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. (Goldstein, p. 161) In other words, Sabato has the record exactly wrong here about Eisenhower vs. Kennedy and how far each man was willing to go in Vietnam.

    Now, Sabato says it took him five years to put together this book. Goldstein’s work was published in 2008. John Prados’ book, Operation Vulture, was published in 2002. In addition to himself, Sabato had his colleague at Virginia, history professor Andrew Bell, help him compose the book. (Sabato, p. xi) And also Sean Lyons, who “supervised a crack team of graduate and undergraduate interns and researchers.” Sabato then goes on to name 28 members of that intern team. So, in all, we are to believe that 31 people missed both the Goldstein book and the Prados book? I don’t think so. Again, as with the civil rights issue, Sabato ignored the factual record because it did not fit into his preconceived agenda.

    But that is just the beginning of Sabato mangling the record on Kennedy and Vietnam. Sabato writes that by the autumn of 1963, Kennedy realized his strategy for Vietnam was not working. He writes this in the context of Kennedy’s flexible response concept to communism. (Sabato, p. 123) Now, let us assume Sabato is correct: Kennedy had somehow chosen Vietnam as an anti-communist battleground. That he was employing flexible response, and the first step, sending in more advisers was not working. Would not the next step up the response ladder be sending in combat troops? Why did Kennedy not order them in at this time? Why did he do the opposite, that is sign NSAM 263 which actually ordered all advisers out beginning in December of 1963 and the last ones out in 1965? Sabato cannot even bring himself to type the words “NSAM 263”. So he says this was just a political ploy by Kennedy to get re-elected. He can get away with this because he does not tell the reader about the other part of the plan: the total withdrawal by 1965. (Sabato, p. 126)

    But further, Sabato does not tell the reader that today we can pretty much put together the origins of the withdrawal plan. It began way back in early 1962. After Kennedy had agreed to send in more advisers, he sent John Kenneth Galbraith to Saigon to give him a report on conditions there and if further American involvement would help. Predictably, Galbraith came back with a view that increased American involvement would not help Diem. That report was passed on to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Kennedy now told McNamara to begin putting together a plan to wind down the war. The military dragged its feet on this. But at the Sec/Def meeting in May of 1963, the plans were all presented through the assembly of an in country team in Hawaii. McNamara replied that the pace was too slow and it should be speeded up. This was reported back to Kennedy. And this was what Kennedy activated when he signed NSAM 263 in October of 1963. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 365-371) Needless to say, Sabato leaves all of this out of his book.

    For this and other reasons, both noted and unnoted, as a discussion of Kennedy’s presidency, Sabato’s book is worthless.

    V

    As I noted above, Sabato begins his book with Kennedy’s arrival at Love Field in Dallas. At this point of the book, the author simply describes the assassination pretty much as the Warren Commission does. With all the errors of that fraudulent document intact. For example, the author writes that Howard Brennan saw a man with a gun on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. (Sabato, p. 11) In fact, as many authors, including Ian Griggs have noted, it’s highly unlikely that Brennan saw anyone. Sabato describes the entire Truly/Baker/Oswald incident on the second floor lunchroom just as it is in the Warren Report. Again, this is highly suspect today. It has been questioned by some because Baker never mentioned the incident, or Oswald, in his first day affidavit. Even though when he made out the affidavit, Oswald was sitting right across from him in the witness room at Dallas Police headquarters. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 192-96) But researcher Sean Murphy has gone beyond that. He argues, with compelling evidence and logic that, at the time of the assassination, Oswald was most likely outside the building. Standing back in the alcove of the Houston street doorway with his sandwich and soda pop. In the Darnell film, this image has been termed “Prayer Man”, because of the position of the subject’s hands in still shots. The man next to this figure, and a step above him, is Wesley Frazier. Needless to say, if this figure is actually Oswald, not only is the Warren Commission shown to be a complete fraud, but also the worst suspicions about Frazier being suborned are also true. (See this discussion of the issue.)

    In his discussion of the medical evidence, Sabato has the same problem Philip Shenon did. He doesn’t seem to be aware that what he says contradicts the extant exhibits. For instance, he says that Secret Service agent Emory Roberts saw massive head trauma to Kennedy while taking his body into Parkland Hospital. (Sabato, p. 13) Yet, no photos we have today show such massive head trauma. Two pages later, the author says that Kennedy had one third of his brain blasted away. Well then Larry, why do the photos and the Ida Dox drawings for the HSCA depict an almost totally intact brain? Again, like Shenon, the man doesn’t understand that he is arguing for a case of conspiracy.

    Sabato then goes further in this vein. In his brief discussion of CE 399 he allows that it may have been found on Kennedy’s stretcher. And, in fact, it could have been planted. (ibid) But, a few pages later, he says its certain that Oswald killed Officer Tippit. When, in fact, as John Armstrong and Joe McBride have written, it is not even a sure case that Oswald was at the scene of the Tippit murder. And the latest evidence in that case, the so-called “third wallet”, would appear to indicate that he was not there and someone planted that wallet.

    As per Oswald’s arrest at the Texas Theater, Sabato recites some of the worst Warren Commission balderdash. Namely that Oswald tried to shoot Officer McDonald. As many authors have proven, not only did this not happen, the FBI proved it could not have happened. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, pgs. 202-03)

    Later on in the book, unlike Shenon, Sabato acknowledges that there are some problems in the evidentiary records. In my e-mail exchange about the book with attorney Dan Alcorn, he revealed that this section probably stems from Sabato’s talks with him. In fact, outside of the chapter on the Hart Research polling, this is probably the best part of the book. Which, as the reader can see, is damning with faint praise.

    Sabato includes in this part of the book, the following statement, “…any fair minded observer can conclude that both the Dallas police and, for more important, the federal government botched the most important murder investigation of the twentieth century.” (Sabato, p. 139) Sabato mentions that the Dallas Police did not cordon off the Depository building anywhere near quickly enough. He then says that Oswald should never have been paraded in front of crowds in the DPD headquarters as he was. He notes that the Warren Commission inexplicable failed to interview some important Dealey Plaza witnesses, like Bill and Gayle Newman. (Ibid, p. 140) He admits that Vickie Adams, who went down the stairs of the Depository right after the shooting was treated like a threat to the Commission, not a valuable witness. (ibid, p. 146)

    But after this fairly decent Chapter 7, something happens. Sabato seems to understand that he has stepped too close to the precipice. So he steps backward in his next chapter, which is mostly about Oswald. He badly underplays all we know about the man today. Sabato actually seems to buy into the hogwash that Oswald was looking to shoot Richard Nixon. Which is a story that not even the Warren Commission bought into. (Sabato, p. 171) He then adds that Oswald also shot at General Walker. In his footnotes, he bases this on the rifling characteristics of the so-called recovered bullet and how it allegedly matches the Mannlicher Carcano rifle in evidence. What he does not say is that, first, almost all rifle bullets have the same rifling pattern the FBI attributed to the bullet in evidence today. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 80) But second, the bullet in evidence today is not the bullet originally recovered by the Dallas Police. (ibid, p. 76) Apparently, Sabato is desperate to make Oswald into some kind of sociopathic killer. He’s so desperate, he uses phony evidence to do it.

    Like Vincent Bugliosi, Sabato is intent on getting the CIA off the hook for any culpability in the JFK case. So, he writes that the Agency as an institution was not involved in the conspiracy. Which is neither here nor there, since no one claims that Director John McCone was involved in the plot. (Sabato, p. 188) But he then writes that, overall, the Agency sent good information to the Warren Commission. Again, this might be true as an overall statement. But it is not true in certain crucial areas of the case. And Sabato cooperates with the Agency in covering up those crucial areas. For instance, in his discussion of the Clinton/Jackson incident, he allows that it may have been David Ferrie with Oswald in the two hamlets. (ibid, p. 176) But he then writes that we don’t know who the third man was. Yes we do. But Sabato does not want to admit to the identification of Clay Shaw since it would lend Jim Garrison too much credibility.

    In his discussion of Mexico City, Sabato writes that, “Without question, someone showed up in the Cuban and Russian embassies claiming to be Lee Oswald, but was he actually an Oswald imposter?” (ibid, p. 178) But Sabato does not make clear that almost all the personnel at the Cuban embassy said that the man who visited was not Oswald. Sabato then caps this with a real puzzler. He says that the two differing cables sent from the CIA about Oswald in Mexico – one describing the real Oswald, one describing the famous Mystery Man photo – were likely the result of a mistake. (ibid) He then writes, under a picture of the Mystery Man photo, that some people claim “he was an agent of the eventual assassins, sent to impersonate Oswald.” Where did Sabato get that piece of information? No one I know of has said such a thing. But right after this, Sabato writes that “others say” he was the Russian Yuri Moskalev. Its more than “others say” Larry. That particular piece of information is in the 400 page, thoroughly documented Lopez Report.

    Which it does not appear that Sabato has read. For if he had read it, he would have known that the picture of Moskalev should have never been sent in the first place. When investigators Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway interviewed Mexico City CIA officer Anne Goodpasture, the woman who originally sent the picture, she said she sent it because it was the only photo the CIA station had of a non-Latin male entering the Soviet compound on October 1st, the day the CIA says Oswald made a call there. That turned out to be a lie. Because when Lopez and Hardway went through the raw data, they discovered the photo of Moskalev was not taken on October 1st, but on October 2nd. (Lopez Report, p. 139) This makes what Goodpasture did even more suspect. Because if the photo had been taken on October 1st, it could have been a mistake, since Oswald was still allegedly in Mexico City. But that standard did not apply for the next day. Because Oswald was supposed to have left that morning. In other words, why was Goodpasture even looking for photos of Oswald taken that day?

    Goodpasture then tried her to conceal her faux pas. She attributed her error about the dates to a misreading of the log sheets. But Lopez and Hardway then found the log sheets. On those sheets, the individual days are marked off in columns separated by red percentage marks! (Lopez Report, p. 140) Because of this fact, Lopez and Hardway found Goodpasture’s excuse about a mistake in days “implausible”. And they found it highly unlikely that she would not know about this error for 13 years. That is until the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed in 1976. In fact, Goodpasture was lying again. The two dogged investigators found a CIA cable to Mexico City dated 11/23/63. It said that the photo Goodpasture had sent to them was not of Oswald. The cable then requested a recheck of the photos. (Lopez Report, p. 141) When they did the recheck it was discovered that the Agency had other photos of Moskalev taken after October 2. And, in all likelihood, they knew who he was back in October. (Lopez Report, p. 179) In fact, Lopez and Hardway concluded that Goodpasture knew the picture was not Oswald by October 11th. (ibid, p. 159) In other words, when one familiarizes oneself with the primary documents, the possibility that the Mystery man photo was sent in error is all but eliminated.

    But there is more in this regard that makes the whole Goodpasture/Mystery Man discussion even more malignant. From his footnotes, it does not appear that Sabato interviewed Lopez or Hardway. If he had interviewed them he would have learned something which he probably would not have put in his book. The two had prepared an indictment of Goodpasture for the Justice Department over her multiple perjuries. In other words, Goodpasture was going to be indicted for lying about Oswald and Mexico City in a murder case. (Author’s interview with Dan Hardway, 10/17/2013) But beyond that, the HSCA had prepared two perjury indictments for Goodpasture’s working colleague David Phillips also. And they were on separate counts. When people lie continually, and they risk being indicted by the Justice Department, it’s usually not because they were in error. Its because they were trying to cover something up. The question then becomes: Why were they covering up?

    VI

    If Sabato is not adequate with New Orleans or Mexico City, what can one say about his description of Kennedy’s autopsy. He says, “…the autopsy performed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center … was inadequate in some ways.” (Sabato p. 212) Inadequate? Some, like the HSCA’s Dr. Michael Baden, have called it the exemplar for how not to do an autopsy. For example, neither bullet path in Kennedy was dissected. Neither the bullet that entered his back nor the one that entered his skull. Sabato chalks this up to time limitations. (ibid) This is ridiculous since the body was in front of the pathologists for three hours that night. And the supplementary examination of Kennedy’s brain was done on a different day. Further, Sabato tries to imply that the autopsy doctors – Jim Humes, Thornton Boswell, and Pierre Finck – later agreed with the HSCA about the placement of the head wound in the cowlick area. (Sabato, pgs. 214-15) This is simply false. Humes, and Humes alone, agreed with this at his testimony before the public hearings of the HSCA. But two years later, he went back to his original testimony, that the bullet entered at the base of the skull. The other two doctors have never wavered on this point. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 132)

    Towards the end of his discussion of the evidence, Sabato begins to side with the official story, all the way down the line. He even tries to explain away the fact that there was no copper found on the curb where a bullet ricocheted and hit bystander Jim Tague. (Sabato,pgs. 221, 508) Yet to anyone who has seen the copper coated, Western Cartridge Company bullets supplied for the Mannlicher Carcano rifle attributed to Oswald, this seems simply impossible.

    Chapter 12 culminates Sabato’s six-chapter discussion of the evidence in the JFK case. Predictably, he comes down on the side of the official story. He writes, “There is no reasonable doubt that at least one of John F. Kennedy’s assassins was Lee Harvey Oswald. It may well be that Oswald was the only killer in Dealey Plaza…” (Sabato, p. 248) What he does now is list some of the most questionable and mildewed evidence possible to support that thesis. For instance, he writes that the Mannlicher Carcano was Oswald’s rifle. As several authors have noted, that is no longer a categorical fact. The rifle the Warren Commission says Oswald ordered is not the same rifle the Commission placed into evidence. The Warren Commission had to have known this, but they papered it over. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 57-63) Sabato also says that “…the weight of the evidence is overwhelming that Oswald was there in the window and fired the bullets.” Actually, the weight of the evidence says Oswald was not in that window. If he had been, then he would have had to have run down the stairs after the shooting. Depository workers Vickie Adams and Sandra Styles would have seen or heard him. They did not. Again, the Commission had to have known this. And again, they papered it over. (ibid, pgs. 91-95) The Commission’s star witness to place Oswald on the sixth floor, Howard Brennan, is so bad that not only do people question his identification, today people even wonder if he ever actually identified Oswald at a lineup. (ibid, p. 207)

    Finally, there is Sabato’s bought and paid for attempt to denigrate the acoustics evidence produced by the HSCA, which indicated more than one assassin, and therefore a conspiracy. Sonalysts is a sound engineering company which does much work for both the media and the government. Suffice it to say, since the HSCA’s verdict of conspiracy was issued in 1979 based on the acoustical record of the Dallas Police motorcycle dictabelt, many government-associated bodies have spent countless hours trying to discredit it. I have no strong feelings about this aspect of the case, since in my view, one can prove conspiracy in the JFK case many other ways. But for Sabato to say that not only were the two teams of professionals that the HSCA employed for this study wrong, but they were amateurish to the point that somehow they did not even know where the recording motorcycle was or was not, or if it was even in Dealey Plaza at the time, well that is a bit wild. But it fits with the book’s agenda.

    I don’t consider myself an authority on this aspect of the case. Don Thomas is. I cannot do better in discounting this part of the book than he has already done. I therefore gladly recommend the reader to read his essay on Sabato’s irresponsibility with this evidence.

    VII

    The last part of the book, Chapters 13 through 20, deals with the shadow cast over later presidents by comparisons with the Kennedys. Although there are some interesting observations in this section, like how Ronald Reagan tried to give himself cover for his supply side tax cut by invoking Kennedy’s name, its really rather unsatisfactory. And that is because, throughout, the very unsteady hand of Larry Sabato is drawing comparisons with his misguided historical compass.

    One of the most bizarre statements in this part of the book is when the author says that, since LBJ followed Kennedy, we must give both men credit for not just the civil rights legislation passed in 1964 and 1965, but also for the expansion of the Vietnam War. (Sabato, p. 426) I had to read that statement twice to see if I had misinterpreted it. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I actually think Sabato means it. Which is a bit scary. Because, with the civil rights issue, Johnson was continuing something Kennedy had advocated since, at least, 1957. And, in fact, JFK had largely paved the way for Johnson to come in and sign the 1964 act.

    The case with Vietnam is not at all the same. Johnson actually broke with Kennedy’s withdrawal policy, which had been in preparation since 1962. And which Kennedy had explicitly primed through McNamara at the Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii, and then signed into law with NSAM 263. And, in fact, if one consults the latest scholarly books on the subject, e.g. James Blight’s Virtual JFK, one will see documentary evidence that says Johnson knowingly and deliberately reversed Kennedy’s policy. Contrary to what Sabato writes, LBJ thoroughly understood that he was breaking with Kennedy’s withdrawal policy. (Sabato, p. 281) But he did it anyway. Further, he bullied McNamara into now being his point man on an escalation policy. At the same time that he ridiculed Kennedy’s withdrawal plan to the secretary! (Blight, pgs. 304-310) Why should Sabato ask us to give Kennedy equal credit for a policy of his that Johnson had now reversed?

    But beyond that, there was a precedent for this in the record. In 1961, President Kennedy sent Vice-President Johnson to Saigon to meet with South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. Even at this early date, Johnson was in consultations with the Pentagon and being advised the USA had to escalate the war. When he met with Diem, with one of the generals he had talked to previously in the room, he told him he probably needed American combat troops to win the war. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 72) This was not in line with Kennedy’s policy. In 1961, JFK turned down no less than nine requests to send combat troops to Vietnam. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pgs. 53-66) And we know what happened afterwards. In less than three months, Johnson signed NSAM 288. These were plans for a massive air war over Vietnam. In other words, something Kennedy never even contemplated in three years, Johnson had signed off on in three months. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 369) No surprise, NSAM 288 is not even mentioned by Sabato.

    Sabato goes even further in this regard. He makes the argument, similar to one in David Halberstam’s obsolete book The Best and the Brightest, that somehow there was a consensus within America for Johnson to escalate the war. That somehow, this was pre-ordained and that the Vietnam War was part of some kind of inevitable, tragic arc. As Fredrik Logevall demonstrated in his book, Choosing War, this is simply not the case. Johnson could have gotten out in 1964. In fact, LBJ was encouraged by some powerful and important people, like Walter Lippman, to do just that. He ignored that advice. (Blight, p. 240) As Logevall demonstrates in detail, from almost the week he became president, to the spring of 1965, Johnson essentially planned for America’s direct intervention in Vietnam. As Logevall further demonstrates, but which Sabato tries to imply, Robert Kennedy had nothing to do with any of it. (Sabato, p. 279)

    Just how obsessed was Johnson with presenting a unified front in his escalation plan? When Vice-President Hubert Humphrey suggested a rather mild alternative – negotiating with North Vietnam – Johnson banned him from meetings and placed him under surveillance. (Blight, pgs. 188-89) I would like to hear Sabato say that Kennedy would have done the same.

    Near the end, the Sabato can’t control himself. And now his true agenda becomes manifest. He actually says that President Obama is well to the left of President Kennedy. (Sabato, p. 339) Which is such a ludicrous statement that it could only be designed to get him on television. Since only the likes of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather could listen to such nonsense without laughing. In my book Destiny Betrayed, and further in my speech at Cyril Wecht’s Passing the Torch conference in Pittsburgh, I demonstrated in depth and detail where Kennedy had consciously and deliberately altered the Eisenhower/Dulles foreign policy. That previous policy was based on a globalist view of American imperialism, especially in the Third World. Kennedy’s overall view of this matter was different. Kennedy was much more of a nationalist who was willing to accept non-aligned countries e.g. Indonesia, Laos, Congo, Egypt, Brazil. Therefore, once he took office, there was a clear demarcation and overturning of previous policy. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 28-33) This had been in the making for years, since Kennedy’s foreign policy ideas can be traced back to his meeting with State Department official Edmund Gullion in Saigon in 1951. (ibid, p. 21)

    The problem that many people have with Obama is that there has been no real reversal in foreign policy from his horrendous predecessor. Or if there has, it has been rather minimal. On the domestic side, because he took office in time of economic emergency, Obama had an opportunity to actually launch a Second New Deal. To put it mildly, he did not. That he was not going to do so was pretty much a given once one saw who he was placing into positions of power on his economics team e.g. Lawrence Summers. Kennedy’s chief economic adviser, Walter Heller, was a Keynesian. I doubt very much that Heller would have been satisfied with what Summers and Tim Geithner proposed to get the USA out of the greatest economic debacle since 1929. In fact, their anemic proposals are a large reason we are still mired in what Paul Krugman has called The Great Recession. Recall, Kennedy thought the Eisenhower recession was unacceptable. In fact, one can argue that the Obama/Geithner/Summers plan essentially preserved the nutty supply-side theories Ronald Reagan, which were adapted from Milton Friedman. Friedman was a man who Heller used to make fun of. And it was Friedman’s ideas, as implemented by Reagan, that caused the great and permanent transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper classes in America.

    So when Sabato ends his book by saying there really was no Kennedy legacy, this tells us more about him than it tells us about Kennedy. If there was no lasting legacy, it was because that legacy was crushed. This was begun by Johnson’s reversal of Kennedy’s foreign policy in several places, like Indonesia and Congo. Another place would be Kennedy’s back channel with Fidel Castro. Sabato doesn’t mention these, so he can act as if they did not exist. Secondly, Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War began the economic stagflation which afflicted the economy for well over a decade. In fact, it was the wrenching of that stagflation out of the economy by Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker under President Carter that contributed to the coming of Ronald Reagan.

    The other factor that brought on Reagan was Carter’s coziness with the Shah of Iran. Once Carter appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski as his National Security Advisor, this automatically brought Carter closer to David Rockefeller. Rockefeller was a friend of the Shah’s since his bank housed much of Iran’s money. As Donald Gibson has pointed out, Kennedy was opposed to the globalist designs of David Rockefeller. (Battling Wall Street, pgs. 73-74) And as James Bill notes in his book The Eagle and the Lion, the Kennedy brothers were much opposed to the Shah’s regime. Therefore, because of the Carter/Brzezinski/Rockefeller axis, once the Shah was overthrown, and the fundamentalist Islamic forces took power, America became their target. This was something which Kennedy warned about as far back as his great Algeria speech in 1957. All of this crucial data is quite naturally ignored by Sabato and his team of 31. But you can read about it here.

    Except for where he notes some of the problems with the JFK assassination’s evidentiary record, this book is pretty much not just without distinction, but so agenda driven as to be misleading. On the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder, we needed a lot better. As Mike Swanson notes, Sabato got his MSM appearances. But the rest of us needed a book that told us much more about John Kennedy, and much less about Larry Sabato.

  • Philip Shenon, A Cruel and Shocking Act

    Philip Shenon’s book A Cruel and Shocking Act begins with a deception. It then gets worse.

    On the frontispiece, before the actual text begins, Shenon quotes from Marina Oswald’s Warren Commission testimony. In that particular quote, Marina was asked if Lee Oswald had visited Mexico City. She replied that yes, Oswald had told her that he had been at the Cuban and Russian embassies.

    In itself, this is an accurate quote. But what Shenon does not tell the reader here, and in fact what he does not say until nearly 200 pages later, is this: that during her first Secret Service interview she denied Oswald had ever told her he was in Mexico. She did this more than once, and she was categorical about it. She even denied it when she was not asked about it. Just because she had seen the story about Oswald in Mexico City on television. (Secret Service Report by Charles Kunkel “Activities of the Oswald Family November 24 through November 30, 1963”)

    When Shenon does admit she initially denied it, he does not mention a major event that occurred after the initial denial and almost simultaneously with her February appearance before the Warren Commission. A week after her initial appearance before the Commission-where she now changed her story about Mexico City and several other matters-Marina signed a contract with a film company called Tex-Italia Films. The grand total of funds transferred to her was $132, 500. Which today would amount to about a half million dollars. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 977) What makes this transaction so intriguing is that when the company partners were investigated, it was discovered that they used false names. Further, the company’s business offices were asked to leave the lot they were located on for failure to pay their rent. Finally, there was no film made by Tex-Italia about Marina or her dead husband. (ibid)

    Now, to most people, these events and the subsequent reversals of testimony would seem relevant to the story Shenon is telling. After all, if the reader was informed of this information, one conclusion he or she could come to is that Tex-Italia was a front company, and its main purpose was to get Marina Oswald to testify to a tale that was more in line with the official story about Kennedy’s assassination. After all, Mexico City was quite important to the Commission. As we shall see, it is even more important to Shenon. If there is a serious question about Oswald being there, then the Oswald story begins to wobble about in a direction the Commission, and Shenon, do not want it to go. Therefore, in addition to beginning his book with this misleading testimony, in addition to not informing the reader about the timing of the financial transaction, when one scans the index of Shenon’s long book, the reader will not find an entry for Tex-Italia Films.

    Let us move to another section of the book to see how Shenon again censors information to present at best, an incomplete picture, at worst a deceptive one. On page 45, Shenon is describing a phone call between President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the Saturday morning after Friday’s assassination. But before he does that, he prefaces what he is about to present by saying that Hoover “was never as well informed as he pretended to be; he did not always bother to learn all the facts…” (Shenon, p. 46)

    Why does the author do this in advance? Probably because Hoover told Johnson that the evidence against Oswald at this time was not very strong and “The case as it stands now isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction.” (ibid) Shenon does not like this statement. So he now states that the evidence against Oswald on Saturday was “overwhelming”. He then writes that witnesses could identify him at the scene of the Tippit murder and with a rifle in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. That Oswald purchased the rifle the police found on the sixth floor. And that he also purchased a pistol used in the murder of Tippit, and his wallet had a card in the name of A. Hidell used in the mail order purchases of the weapons.

    Again, by not informing the reader of the true state of this evidence today, Shenon cuts off an alternative to his characterization of Hoover’s discussion. Namely that Hoover was correct about the state of the evidence. For example, the rifle the police found and attributed to Oswald is not the rifle the FBI said Oswald ordered. The rifle the Commission is going to say was ordered was a 36″ Mannlicher-Carcano carbine. The rifle found by the Dallas Police was a 40″ short rifle. Klein’s, the sporting good store in Chicago where Oswald was supposed to have ordered the rifle from, did not put scopes on the 40″ model. Yet this one had a scope on it. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 56-63) The night before, Hoover’s agents were at Klein’s for hours on end. They ended up confiscating the microfilm about these orders. Isn’t it possible that Hoover then knew about some problems in the evidentiary record? Shenon does not have to disclose that since he never tells the reader about any of these contradictions about this transaction.

    Shenon is equally nebulous about the transaction for the pistol he says was used in the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. That handgun was supposed to have been delivered to Oswald by a private company called REA (Railway Express Agency). This was a forerunner to companies like Federal Express and UPS. REA should have sent a card to Oswald’s post office box to tell him the handgun had arrived. Oswald then would have had to present an ID and a certificate of good character to have a firearm given to him via a mail transaction. And REA had to have kept these records in compliance with state and federal laws.

    There is no evidence that any postcard was ever sent to Oswald’s box by REA. (DiEugenio, ibid, p. 104) Neither is there any paper work in evidence about Oswald presenting the ID or the certificate of good character. In fact, there is not even any signature of a receipt for the transaction in the Warren Commission volumes. In other words there is no evidence that this transaction ever took place as the Commission said it did. Or that REA submitted payment to the company who allegedly supplied the pistol. But more to our point here: There is no proof, or even evidence in the Commission volumes that the FBI ever even visited REA in Dallas to check on this transaction. (ibid)

    Now if Shenon thinks that the FBI did not visit REA about this matter then he was never qualified to write this book. The much more logical conclusion is that they did visit REA. But they could not find any of the back up materials to certify this as Oswald’s transaction. If that is the case, then Hoover did know what he was talking about during the call with President Johnson.

    Many authors have discussed the speciousness of the eyewitness testimony in both the Kennedy murder and the Tippit murder. The two most important witnesses in that regard, respectively Howard Brennan and Helen Markham, were so poor that several Commission lawyers did not want to include them in the Warren Report. They felt that their inclusion would create serious problems for the document. Which, as we will see, they did. (Edward Jay Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles, p. 144) There was a real battle in the Commission over these witnesses. This is a point that Shenon very much underplays. But which tends to bolster the Hoover statement about the case against Oswald being weak.

    Let us now deal with the point about the wallet identification of Oswald as Hidell, which certified him as the purchaser of the weapons under an alias. As many people know, the Dallas Police said that they took Oswald’s wallet from him on the way to the police station, after his arrest at the Texas Theater. It was not until many years later that a crucial discrepancy in this record was discovered. And it ends up it was co-discovered by an FBI agent, Bob Barrett. For there is a film of Barrett handling the wallet at the scene of the Tippit murder. One that is not Tippit’s. Barrett later said it had the Oswald/Hidell identification inside of it. Yet, the Warren Report states that Oswald’s wallet was taken from him on the way to the police station after he was arrested at the Texas Theater. But further, there was a third wallet in evidence, one that the police said Oswald left at the home of Ruth and Michael Paine that morning.

    Question for Mr. Shenon: Do you know anyone who carries three wallets? If you do, please tell us about it. In fact, why did you not even mention this “three wallets” problem in the nearly 600 pages of your book? What most objective observers believe today is that the Dallas Police suppressed the evidence of the Oswald wallet at the Tippit scene to avoid the inescapable suggestion that it had been planted after the fact. Because they knew no one would buy the fact of Oswald having three wallets. If that is the case, then again, Hoover’s comments about the state of the evidence were correct.

    II

    Just how bad is Shenon on the physical evidence in the case? He can write that the alleged rifle and handgun used in the murders came from the same gunshop! (p. 46) Yet, by just browsing through the Warren Report one can see that the rifle came from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, Illinois. The handgun came from Seaport Traders in Los Angeles, California. The odd thing about this is that although the Commission says they were ordered months apart, they both were shipped on the same day. This is an intriguing fact, which Shenon does not note. (See Warren Report, pgs. 121, 174) What makes it more intriguing is that, as with the missing paperwork at REA, the corresponding paperwork is also missing at the post office to certify receipt of the rifle. (ibid, DiEugenio, pgs. 61-62) In fact, as with REA, there is no evidence of any person at the post office saying that they handed the rifle package to Oswald. Which is hard to believe. Because when transferring firearms from out of state shippers, postal regulations stated that one had to present an ID card to certify that you were the person who rented that post office box. As Shenon states, the rifle was allegedly ordered in Hidell’s name. Since Oswald rented the box office in his own name, the rifle package should have been sent back unopened. (ibid) But if Oswald did show he was really Hidell, would not someone at the post office have recalled that fact? Especially by, say, November 23, 1963? No one did. And that interesting piece of evidence is not noted by Mr. Shenon.

    In order to explain how someone could create all these embarrassing lacunae in this day and age, let us drop in some background about how this book originated. Shenon worked for the New York Times for over two decades. He specialized in reporting on the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the State Department. In other words he dealt in national security issues. In 2008 he published a book about the 9/11 investigation and report called The Commission. Many researchers on that case felt the book was a damage control operation about that inquiry. Therefore, quite naturally, a surviving member of the Warren Commission – Shenon will not reveal who it is – called him and asked him to do a reprise about the Warren Commission. Incredibly, Shenon agreed to do it.

    Why is this so objectionable? Because Shenon admits that it was initiated by a junior counsel who then allowed him access to the other surviving counsels. That would mean that Shenon was in contact with, among others, Howard Willens, David Slawson, Richard Mosk, Sam Stern, Burt Griffin, Melvin Eisenberg, the late Arlen Specter, William T. Coleman, and the late Norman Redlich. Now, these men had been harshly criticized for decades on end. The criticism of them turned vitriolic when Oliver Stone’s film JFK appeared in 1991. One of the main criticisms about they dying mainstream media, especially the NY Times, is that in return for access and information, reporters tend to give the reader a one-sided version of the facts. Mainly because their sources have an agenda which usually amounts to something called “covering your ass”. No quasi-legal body in history ever had more of a reason for CYA than the Warren Commission. Yet, Shenon agreed to this arrangement. Not only did he agree to it, but as we will see, he accepted everything his sources told him-with gusto and relish. Because of that unprofessional closeness to his sources and subject, the book becomes so biased as to be, at best, almost useless. At worst it is a propaganda tract for the Commission survivors. It becomes that because, as we will see, Shenon values his sources over the declassified evidence of the Assassination Records Review Board. This might be good and profitable for him. It is not good for the reader, or for the writing of good history.

    A good example of the compromising that Shenon has to do to accommodate his sources appears on page 168 of his book. Because he has chosen to side with these men, Shenon has to bow before the absurd premises of Single Bullet Theory. In fact, Shenon writes that “Later scientific analysis backed the commission’s theory.” Apparently, no one told Shenon that if “scientific analysis” did back it then he would not have to refer to it as a theory. But even worse, he deliberately presents his diagram from an angle both from the front and slightly above the limousine. This does much to eliminate the vertical and horizontal problems with the trajectory of CE 399, the Magic Bullet. For instance, by framing his drawing in that way, Shenon does not reveal the entry point on Kennedy’s back. In fact, in the wording that accompanies the drawing, the author says the bullet enters “Kennedy’s body from behind” at a “slightly downward angle”. Shenon cannot bring himself to say that the bullet hit Kennedy in the back from sixty feet up. Which would make it very hard to believe that it could then deflect upward to exit his throat, especially since, as he notes, it did not hit any bony body structures.But further, by disguising this unknown angle, Shenon now arranges everything from Kennedy’s throat outward in a straight line. Even though the magic bullet smashed two bones in Connally!

    In further obeisance to his sources Shenon ignores two key pieces of physical evidence to revive something that never happened. First, when author Josiah Thompson questioned both of John Connally’s doctors, Robert Shaw and Charles Gregory, he asked them if they thought the bullet that went through Kennedy also went through Connally. They said no, because there were no fibers from clothes in the bullet path of Connally’s back wound. (ibid, DiEugenio, p. 110) Secondly, when the ARRB interviewed several medical witnesses who participated in the autopsy at Bethesda, they testified that the malleable probes inserted into Kennedy’s back were all too low to exit the throat. And further, the slope of the angle was much too steep to connect the two points. (ibid, pgs. 116-17) This is the kind of trouble one invites when one enters a complex case from years of experience at the New York Times.

    But Shenon features another specious schematic on page 245 of the book. He calls this one “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Escape”. It traces Oswald from his exit from the Texas School Book Depository after the murder of Kennedy, to his arrest at the Texas Theater. Shenon first says that Oswald boarded a bus. He was walking the wrong way to board the bus, and the bus would have dropped him off seven blocks from his house. He could have caught a bus nearby which carried him across the street from his house. (WR, p. 160) Shenon then says that Oswald got off the bus and hailed a taxi cab. What he doesn’t say is that Oswald walked back toward the scene of the crime and then offered to give up the cab to an elderly lady. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 83) Mr. Shenon, do these acts sound like a man trying to “escape”?

    Shenon’s map then has Oswald arriving at his rooming house on Beckley Street at 1:00. But it does not say that he then left at 1:04. Shenon now shows us just how in bed he is with his Commission sources. He says that Tippit was shot at 1:15 PM. As writers on the Tippit case have demonstrated, most recently Joseph McBride and John Armstrong, there is simply no credible evidence that places the murder of Tippit that late.

    For instance, T. F. Bowley places the shooting at 1:10. And Bowley looked at his watch. (Meagher, p. 254) Since Shenon does not note Bowley, he cannot tell the reader that the Commission never interviewed Bowley. (ibid) As McBride notes, Helen Markham caught her bus regularly for work walking from the intersection of 10th and Patton, the scene of the murder, toward Jefferson. She would start her walk at about 1:04. The FBI timed the walk at about 2 and a half minutes. Which would place the shooting at about 1:07. (McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 245) The problem for Shenon is that the distance from the rooming house to the scene of the Tippit shooting is nearly one mile. How on earth could Oswald, in street clothes, traverse that distance in six minutes or less? But further, no one saw him traveling in that direction. (Meagher, p. 255) Shenon then has Oswald entering the Texas Theater at 1:40 PM. The reader should then ask: Why did it then take Oswald almost twice as long to travel a distance that was almost the same length?

    These two drawings in A Cruel and Shocking Act tell us all we need to know about the book. As well as does the excision of the following witness testimony. One will not find the name of Roger Craig in Shenon’s index. Probably because Craig’s affidavit, and the corroborating one of Marvin Robinson, vitiate the Commission’s version of “Oswald’s Escape”. Right after the shooting of Kennedy, Craig described a man running down the incline opposite the Depository and jumping into a Rambler auto pulling out of Dealey Plaza on Elm Street. Robinson said the same. When officer Craig got to City Hall, he recognized the man he saw jumping into the Rambler as Oswald. (Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, pgs 242-43)

    But, for obvious reasons, even though he had a corroborating witness, the Commission decided they had to disregard Craig. So does Shenon.

    III

    In other places where Shenon tries to deal with the evidence, he shows himself to be so amateurish that he himself undermines his own case. For instance, he writes that the head shot, “blew away much of the right hemisphere of his brain, an image captured in awful photographs.” (Shenon, p. 22) What the heck is Shenon talking about here? There is no such image in autopsy photos at the National Archives. And, in fact, this shows just how unfamiliar the author is with the actual declassified records of the ARRB. For the images of Kennedy’s brain show a nearly intact brain. And for Shenon to write that much of the right side is gone reveals him to be, inadvertently, in the camp of the conspiracy theorists he is frequently assailing. For many of the critics of the medical evidence believe, based on the medical witnesses, that much of the brain had to be dissipated. (DiEugenio, ibid, p. 137) The problem is that-in spite of what Shenon says – no picture depicts such a damaged brain. Nor does the drawing made by Ida Dox for the HSCA.

    It seems that Shenon wants to have something new to hang his hat on. So he begins the book with three facets of the evidence he thinks will do the trick. The problem is they do no such thing, since they have all been thoroughly discussed for decades.

    The first “new event” Shenon depicts is the fact that Dr. James Humes did not just burn his notes of the autopsy, he incinerated his first draft. This was made obvious about 15 years ago, when ARRB Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn examined Humes. But Shenon wants to be able to hang onto the story that Humes did this so that the autopsy would not drop into the hands of illicit ghoulish souvenir hunters who would then display the bloodied documents. (Shenon, p. 23) As Gary Aguilar has pointed out, the problem with maintaining that fairy tale is that Gunn found out that Humes burned it at his house, which is where the draft in question had been penned. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 165) When Gunn pressed him on this, Humes tried a different excuse instead of the bloodied souvenir stuff pretext: “it might have been errors in the spelling, or I don’t know what was the matter with it…” (ibid) Its revealing of Shenon that he sticks with the now exposed cover story, and by doing so he tries to cover up for Humes; and also to vilify those “ghouls” who would actually like to see that lost draft.

    The author does another thing of note in his brief discussion of the autopsy. He maintains another specious story, namely that Humes never called Dallas from Bethesda until the next day, Saturday. But to name one important witness, radiologist John Ebersole told the HSCA that this call took place on Friday night. (ibid, p. 168-69) But further, that afternoon, in a televised press conference, Dr. Malcolm Perry, who cut the tracheotomy over the throat wound, said three times that this wound was an entrance wound. Dr. George Burkley, who was at Parkland Hospital when Kennedy died, was also in the autopsy room that night. He would have had to have known about the entrance wound in the throat. Finally, nurse Audrey Bell told the ARRB that Perry told her he had been getting calls from Washington during that Friday night. (DiEugenio, pgs. 143-44) What many people believe happened is that this myth about the next day call was created in order to give time to alter the entrance wound in the throat into an exit wound. And sure enough, Secret Service agent Elmer Moore was shortly after stationed in Dallas and was talking Perry out of his first day story. (Ibid)

    It’s hard to believe in 2013, but Elmer Moore’s name is mentioned just once by Shenon. Why is it hard to believe? Because after Moore accomplished his mission at Parkland in preparation for Arlen Specter’s questioning of the emergency room staff, he then became the bodyguard/valet for Earl Warren on the Warren Commission. (ibid, p. 144) In his one mention of his name, Shenon muddies this transition by Moore. He implies that Moore accompanied Warren to Dallas for Jack Ruby’s polygraph test solely for protection purposes. This is not accurate. As writers like Pat Speer and Aguilar have shown, after working over Perry, Moore became almost a personal assistant to Warren throughout much of the Commission proceedings. And this was done at Warren’s request. As Speer notes, Warren wanted Moore to help “the Commission for an indefinite period to assist in its work.” (ibid, p. 144) It is not possible to give an accurate and candid presentation about the Warren Commission without fully describing what Moore did in the alteration of testimony, plus the fact that Warren requested his assistance afterwards.

    The second piece of old evidence that Shenon reports as being long hidden is the destruction of a photograph of Oswald by Marina and Oswald’s mother Marguerite. To use just one example, this incident was thoroughly described by writers like the late Jack White and Greg Parker many years ago. It is also described at length by Vincent Bugliosi in his colossal book, Reclaiming History. Like Bugliosi, who Shenon greatly admires, the author wants us to think that somehow this is another of the infamous “backyard photographs” which the Commission, and Life Magazine, used to incriminate Oswald. But like Bugliosi, Shenon does not quote Marina’s testimony before the HSCA about this point. (Shenon, p. 25) Her memory of this was very hazy and unreliable. But further, Marguerite described this particular photo as being different than the others. She said, in this one, Oswald was holding the rifle above his head with both hands. Further, that this one was addressed to his daughter June. June was two years old at the time. These points are rather indecipherable. Especially in light of the fact that Marina originally said she took just one backyard photo. (ibid, DiEugenio, p. 86) Which is probably why the Commission, when they had the opportunity, did not press far at all in this field.

    The last piece of “hidden” evidence that Shenon uses is also mildewed. It’s the note Oswald left for James Hosty at FBI headquarters before the assassination. (Shenon, p. 25) But again, in this case, its not like the Commission did not know about this incident. During the questioning of Ruth Paine, the subject surfaced since it was mentioned in a letter Oswald allegedly wrote to the Russian Embassy in Washington and Ruth had copied. (McKnight, p. 260) It was also mentioned in her March 1964 testimony. If there was no follow up on this, it appears its because that is the way the Commission wanted it. But further, unlike what Shenon tries to convey, Hosty was asked about the surveillance of Oswald by the FBI prior to Kennedy’s arrival in Dallas. And the questioner was one of Shenon’s presumed sources, Sam Stern. (ibid, p. 261)

    I believe the point of this section of the book is to show that somehow, certain evidence was not revealed to the Commission. But as the reader can see, this is not really accurate. The only piece of evidence that one can really make that argument for is the first draft of the autopsy report burned by Humes. But in terms of relevancy to any Commission work or conclusions, this has no real retroactive impact. To anyone familiar with the evidence and the Commissions’ work, it is this medical evidence that the Commission made almost no inquiry into. As other authors have shown, the Warren Commission was so uninterested in this key issue that they accepted falsified drawings as illustrations for the head and neck wound to President Kennedy. (DiEugenio, pgs. 120-22) These were Commission Exhibits 385 and 388. They are illustrations made by 22 year old, first year medical artist Harold Rydberg. These two drawings – which show a flat direction to the neck wound, and an upward direction to the head wound – were meant to demonstrate, not what was seen in the autopsy room, but what the Commission had already decided upon as their conclusions. But further, the drawing of the back wound places the wound in the neck, when the declassified autopsy photos show it to be in Kennedy’s back. And the drawing of the head wound puts Kennedy’s head in a position it is not in at Zapruder film frame 313, the instant of the head shot.

    Incredibly, Shenon does not mention the Rydberg drawings or their misrepresentations. Which, considering what he did with his drawing of the Single Bullet Theory and “Oswald’s Escape”, perhaps is not so incredible. Its par for the course. But the point about these three above issues-the burnt autopsy report, the missing Oswald photo, the Hosty note – making any difference for the Commission, for reasons stated above, this is simply not convincing.

    Before leaving the subject of the medical evidence, we should note one more point. Throughout the book, Shenon tries to say that somehow, Bobby Kennedy influenced the Commission, and he therefore limited its use of the autopsy materials. As noted by many other authors, this is simply not the case. The autopsy photos were in the hands of the Secret Service at this time. Which is why Secret Service agent Elmer Moore showed one of them to Arlen Specter. (DiEugenio, p. 145) Whatever limitations were placed on the Commission in its use of these materials, they had little or nothing to do with Robert Kennedy. Because the deed of gift for these materials to the Kennedy family would not be signed until 1965, the year after the Commission expired. Somehow, in writing a book about the Warren Commission, Shennon couldn’t find the space to include a sentence with that bit of information in it.

    IV

    Shenon does uncover some interesting information about the work habits of the Commission. For instance, he says that Coleman worked about one day a week. (p. 109) Also that Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin split his workweek between the Commission and his practice. But presumable he did some work for the Commission while in his office. Another interesting point is the paucity of criminal lawyers that Howard Willens picked to man the staff. The clear majority of lawyers were business or corporate lawyers. Which makes very little sense in a criminal procedure, where experience counts a lot. One of the Commission lawyers who did have such experience, Burt Griffin, admitted this was a problem. (Shenon, p. 125) Many of Willens’ recruits were recent Ivy League graduates on their way up the corporate law ladder.

    But what Shenon reveals later is even more startling in this regard. And that is this: some of the lawyers that administrator Howard Willens brought in had no real legal experience at all! The problem was, too many people were leaving. Obviously, what happened-which Shenon does not want to make explicit – is that the private practice billing paid much more than what these men were getting on the Warren Commission. And since, whatever Shenon says, none of these men were great fans of Kennedy, very few of them were going to spend ten months of their lives working on this case while they were losing money. Of the junior counsels, David Belin left in May. Leon Hubert quit right after that. Specter left in June. Only David Slawson, Burt Griffin and Wesley Liebeler were there regularly after that (p. 404) Almost all the senior counsels had left by June also. The case of Leon Hubert quitting is interesting. (Shenon, p. 284) Its so interesting that Shenon papers it over. He says that Hubert essentially quit, but he is not explicit as to why.

    Hubert quit because he was a senior counsel who actually wanted to do a real investigation. He wanted to find out who Jack Ruby really was and where his associations were. In fact, he and Griffin wrote two interesting memos in this regard. Both of which, because of his agenda, Shenon does not print. The first was written in March of 1964. It reads in part, “The most promising links between Jack Ruby and the assassination of President Kennedy are established through underworld figures and anti-Castro Cubans and extreme rightwing Americans.” This, of course, turned out to be quite insightful considering the time it was written, plus the fact that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach were all trying to shut down and limit the inquiry. (A fact which Shenon greatly underplays.) Two months later, the two wrote another prophetic memo. This one said, “We believe that a reasonable possibility exists that Ruby has maintained a close interest in Cuban affairs to the extent necessary to participate in gun sales and smuggling…” This turned out to be accurate, as authors like Henry Hurt and John Armstrong later discovered. Two examples of Ruby doing so were with Thomas Davis and Eddie Browder. Shenon fails to point this out, since the former leads to the CIA and the latter to the Mafia.

    But in that same memo, the two then topped themselves. They wrote that, “Neither Oswald’s Cuban interests in Dallas nor Ruby’s Cuban activities have been adequately explored…” That sentence is pregnant with intrigue in two ways. First, it clearly implies that Oswald and Ruby may have known each other through this anti-Castro underground network, one that began in Florida and spread to Texas after the fall of Batista. But second, it says that after six months, they have gotten little cooperation in exploring that venue.

    If the reader turns to the Volume XI of the HSCA, one will get a much more frank and honest discussion of Hubert’s departure than Shenon gives. There, Burt Griffin was asked about Hubert’s leaving. After replying with the standards about his job and family, Griffin got to the point. He said that Hubert became disenchanted and demoralized because he was not getting the kind of support he wanted, especially from Rankin. (HSCA, Vol. XI, p. 268) Griffin went on to say that he and Hubert got the feeling that Rankin, Willens and Norman Redlich, the mid-level administrators, did not have much interest in what he and Hubert were doing. (ibid, p. 271) In this fascinating interview, Griffin revealed that he himself had no contact with either field agents or FBI HQ agents in Washington. Even though that is where the Commission office was. Everything he requested went by memo to the office of the Chief Counsel. (ibid, p. 276) The problem was that in requests to the CIA for info on Jack Ruby and his associations, the CIA did not respond for months. (ibid, p. 283) In fact, it took 16 days for the initial request by Hubert and Griffin to get past Willens and to the CIA. But that is not the worst part. The worst part is this: the reply from the CIA came on September 15th! Which was about two weeks before the report was printed. Griffin could not explain either delay: the 16-day one or the six-month one. But clearly, this is what he was referring to in discussing why Hubert left. In his interview Griffin says that between the time pressures to finish and the internal resistance, they were very limited in what they could do. (ibid, pgs 295-96) In fact, in this HSCA interview, Griffin was confronted with the second memo, the one that mentioned the possible crossover of anti-Castro elements which could be a connecting point between Oswald and Ruby. When asked if the Warren Commission investigation ever focused on that nexus, Griffin replied simply, “No.”

    None of this crucial information is in Shenon’s book. Just as the reporter describes none of Ruby’s ties to organized crime figures or the Dallas Police. (Shenon, p. 197) In fact, Shenon is slavish that he actually repeats the infamous “Sheba defense” for Ruby. That is, Ruby would not have left his dog in the car if he was going to kill Oswald. To clinch the cover up about Ruby, Shenon uses none of the HSCA review of Ruby’s polygraph in his book. Which is astonishing at the same time that it is predictable. Shenon describes Arlen Specter as being in the room for the polygraph, along with FBI technician Bell Herndon. (Shenon, p. 421) He then describes one Ruby lawyer being there. He then says that there was a long list of questions, and Ruby’s answers were disjointed, therefore it took many hours to complete. The next day, Shenon relates to us, Herndon told Specter that Ruby passed the test “with flying colors and clearly was not involved in the assassination.” (ibid) And that is that as far as the author is concerned.

    To say that this is not the whole story is being much too kind to Mr. Shenon. First of all, unlike what Shenon implies, there were a total of eight people in the room for Ruby’s polygraph, and ten during the pretest. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 244) One of them was Bill Alexander, the assistant DA trying the case against Ruby. Contrary to what Shenon writes, Alexander, who interrupted and then actually held off the record conversations with Ruby, caused many of the delays. The HSCA panel concluded that because of the many people present and their interference, Herndon lost control of the proceedings. Something that a polygraph operator should never do. (ibid) Because all the interference and distraction can lead to false readings.

    But that is just the beginning of the problems the HSCA expert panel had about this test. Altogether, the panel listed over ten violations of proper protocol by Bell Herndon. One of which was the actual number and selection of questions. Like almost everything else in this valuable report, Shenon ignores this point. Which strikes at the very heart of Herndon’s “passed with flying colors” comment. There are three types of questions one should ask during a polygraph: control questions, relevant questions, and irrelevant questions. Standard polygraph practice states that there should be perhaps three relevant questions in an exam i.e. questions which touch on actual material matters dealing with the subject’s participation in a crime. The most relevant questions one of the panelists had ever heard of in 30 years of practice was seventeen. Bell’s test for Ruby contained an unheard of 55 relevant questions. The panel said that this violation “showed total disregard of basic polygraph principles.” (ibid) Because, as the panel wrote, “. . . the more a person is tested the less he tends to react when lying. That is…liars become so test-tired they no longer produce significant physiological reactions when lying.” In other words, with that many relevant questions, one could lie and get away with it. This is why the panel said, Bell should have demanded a second test with a second battery of questions in order to crosscheck the first test. He did not.

    There was also a problem with the control questions. These are questions that the operator asks to which he feels the subject will lie. He does this to get a readable reaction against which he can measure the answers to the relevant questions. (ibid, p. 245) The panel criticized Bell’s selection of questions in this regard also, one of which was, “Have you ever been arrested?” This was common knowledge and Ruby affirmed it so how could this be a control question? He was also asked, “Are you married?” as a control question. The panel thought this was much better suited to being an irrelevant question, one asked in order to register a normal response. In other words with this mishmash of questions, it would be difficult to chart definite landmarks in Ruby’s replies.

    But this test, which Shenon accepts at face value, is even worse than that. For Bell also did something that is simply unexplainable in any benign manner. He started the Galvanic Skin Response detector at only 25% capacity. He then lowered it from there. The panel noted this is the opposite of what proper procedure was. (ibid) This is one of the three prime indicators of deception on the test. And it is especially useful in regard to rising emotions in some subjects. The panel thought this reading was almost a complete waste. But they did note that in the first series of questions, when Ruby was relatively fresh, the answer which gave the largest GSR reaction was Ruby’s reply to the question, “Did you assist Oswald in the assassination?” (ibid, p. 245) Ruby replied in the negative. The GSR, even set that low, would indicate he was lying. Somehow, we are to believe that, in five years of research, Shenon did not read this report. The other alternative is worse. He did read it and did not think it was important. Whatever the answer, Shenon’s work on Ruby is even worse than the Warren Commission’s. Which means it’s abysmal.

    V

    Towards the end, Howard Willens was bringing in lawyers to man the Commission who had had nothing to do with the actual inquiry. In fact, if you can comprehend it, Willens hired a student who had not even graduated from law school yet. Murray Laulicht was 24 years old and just taken his last law school exam – in trusts and estates. Laulicht pleaded with Willens to wait until he got his degree. He did on June 4th. That night he went to Washington and started work solving the assassination of President Kennedy. (Shenon, p. 404) This is how seriously Willens took this case. He hired someone who, not only had no experience in practicing law, but had never even worked in a law office before. Shenon does not make one indication of disapproval of Willens’ choice. Even when Rankin assigns Laulicht to complete the biography of Ruby. Quite naturally, Laulicht tells Shenon he had absolutely no problem with the Commission’s version of Ruby shooting Oswald.

    The problem with that, is-again – the HSCA did. To the point that they concluded the Commission was wrong. Ruby did not just walk down the ramp, past the police sentry Roy Vaughn. They concluded that Ruby had help coming in a back door off an alley. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 204) So again, the HSCA overturned another important element dealing with the Warren Commission case against Ruby. Yet, Shenon’s readers, don’t know about it.

    But now the book gets even worse. And I don’t even think Shenon realizes how bad he is getting here. He doesn’t understand that, in his slavish support of the Commission, his book is now attaining entry into the realm of high camp. He actually allows Laulicht, this law student with no experience in doing criminal inquiry, to say that, in his hot headedness and desire to avenge Kennedy’s death, Ruby was acting as a Holocaust survivor would if he saw a Nazi. (Shenon, p. 405) This is so absurd, I have no comment on it. Except to say that, by this point, I was beginning to develop serious problems about both Shenon’s credibility and his gullibility.

    As bad as Shenon is on Ruby, he may be even worse on Oswald. Again, the author tells us that a new Willens recruit came in late in the day. This time to help on the biography of Oswald. Unlike Laulicht, Lloyd Weinreb actually graduated from law school and clerked a year on the Supreme Court. Evidently, that was enough for Willens to think that, he too could help solve the murder of President Kennedy. When Weinreb arrived he was surprised at all the vacant desks in the office. (ibid,p. 405) Most everyone had fled. Apparently, Willens had no problem giving perhaps the most important job on the Commission to this 24-year-old law clerk who had just transferred over to the Justice Department. Albert Jenner had given up trying to complete the biography of Oswald. But Willens was determined it be done, even if it was done by someone who just walked in the door. As Weinreb hints, with so many desertions, with so much work incomplete, it was Willens who was now riding herd to get the report finished. And if he had to hire people who did not know what they were doing, that was fine with him. Even if it meant a team of amateurs was at work solving the most complex and important American murder in the second half of the 20th century.

    But further, it didn’t matter to Willens that these amateurs did not have anywhere near a complete database to work from. For, as Weinreb reveals, when he started going through the FBI and CIA files on Oswald, he noted much material was missing. Shenon and Weinreb try to say this was because staffers took some of it home with them. And they didn’t return it? Highly improbable. With what we saw happening between the CIA and Willens – 16 days to send a memo to Langley, six months to reply – it is much more likely that Willens was satisfied to get any files at all, even if they were incomplete. And he knew that unlike former senior counsel Leon Hubert, someone as green as Weinreb was not going to raise a stink. This is why the biography written of Oswald in the Warren Commission is unsatisfactory today. There are many things the CIA and the FBI had which are not referred to in that report. And that later, writers like John Newman and John Armstrong discovered and included.

    Then there is Richard Mosk. Mosk reviewed the testimony about Oswald’s marksmanship. He was told by both the FBI and the military that the shots were not all that difficult since the motorcade was moving slowly and the rifle had a telescopic sight. Shenon writes this with no comment attached. I have one. If this was so easy, why did no professional marksman for the Commission duplicate what Oswald did? That is, get two of three direct hits in the head and shoulder area within six seconds on their first try. (See for example, Meagher, pgs. 108-09) In fact, as author George O’toole noted, the rifle experts could not even try the experiment with Oswald’s rifle since the firing pin was defective and the telescopic sight was misaligned. Shenon is so eager to validate the procedures of the Commission that he does not even question the obvious: If the scope was used, it would have taken longer for Oswald to fire the three shots for the simple reason that he would have had to wait for the scope to stop vibrating after each explosion in the chamber. And as I have stated elsewhere, in a deposition for the HSCA, the gunsmith at Klein’s sporting goods said that particular rifle was not equipped with a scope by Klein’s. So, how did it get one? Shenon never notes the problem. Therefore, the reader can’t ask the question.

    One of the most startling things about this book is that Shenon appears determined to outdo the Warren Commission’s case against Oswald. Therefore, the author sidesteps the issue of Oswald not having a defense team before the Commission. Even though Earl Warren was one of the most vociferous voices on the bench in pushing the concept that defendants should be furnished with lawyers no matter what their financial situation. Apparently, the fact that Oswald was dead now mitigated Warren’s beliefs in fairness before the law. What really eroded Warren’s ideas about equal justice in this case was the fear of God put in him by President Johnson. As everyone knows today, when LBJ recruited a reluctant Warren to run the Commission, he told him that if he did not take the job, the danger existed that thermonuclear war would incinerate forty million people in an hour. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkand, p. 253) At the first meeting of the staff, Warren reiterated this warning to those present. (Shenon, p. 127) Young attorney Melvin Eisenberg wrote a memo about this meeting. In quoting from it Shenon, like Vincent Bugliosi, leaves out the key part of the memo. After telling the staff about Johnson giving him that nuclear warning, Eisenberg’s memo reads, “The President convinced him that this was an occasion on which actual conditions had to override general principles.”(emphasis added) He then went on to say that they would still seek out the truth. Now, any objective person would have to admit that the italicized clause is the crucial part-perhaps the crucial part – of the memo. By leaving it out, Shenon can later negate what Wesley Liebeler told Sylvia Odio. Liebeler actually told her about Warren’s instruction to them to cover up any evidence of conspiracy. Shenon spins this as being an “outrageous statement”. It is no such thing. It’s a direct echo of that Warren told the staff. (Shenon, p. 417)

    As for outdoing the Commission in regards to Oswald, apparently, Shenon actually buys Marina Oswald’s story about Oswald wanting to kill Nixon. (Shenon, p. 394) Clearly, this was a story planted on Marina, perhaps by her business manager James Martin or by journalistic provocateur Hugh Aynseworth. (See CE 1357; James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 250) She never brought this story up until after her first appearance, Nixon was not in Dallas at the time she said the event occurred, and there was no announcement he was going to be. Finally, as more than one writer has pointed out, the episode could not have ended as Marina describes it with her locking Lee in the bathroom, since the bathroom door locked from the inside. But Shenon treats this whole fantastic episode with kid gloves.

    Shenon also uses the now discredited story about the Depository workers on the fifth floor who heard bullet casings drop on the floor above them. (Shenon, p. 246) Way back in 1977, this story was brought into doubt with an article by Patricia Lambert in Penn Jones’ The Continuing Inquiry. Maybe Shenon didn’t know about that journal. But he can surely surf the Internet. If he did he would have found it there.

    In his embarrassing march In Praise of Folly, Shenon also uses Marrion Baker’s story about encountering Oswald on the second floor lunchroom. (Shenon, p. 247) Today, this story has also come under close scrutiny. First, by this author in his book Reclaiming Parkland. (See pages, 192-96) But also by researchers Greg Parker and Sean Murphy. Murphy has made the most thorough and detailed examination of this story yet. And he has shown that it collapses along multiple fracture lines. In a very long thread at Spartacus Educational, Murphy makes a compelling argument that Oswald was not on the second floor after the assassination. Completely independent of the Altgens photo and the Lovelady/Oswald debate, Murphy makes a fascinating case that Oswald was outside on the top step of the Depository, where he appears to be drinking a Coke.

    But let us give Shenon the benefit of the doubt. Let us assume that he was unaware of the work of both Murphy and Parker. If he had read the Warren Commission volumes he would have understood the following: in his first day affidavit, Baker never mentioned any such second floor incident with Oswald or anyone else. What makes that affidavit so compelling is this: when Baker made it out that afternoon, Oswald was sitting right across from him in the witness room! That room was so small that Baker had to almost fall over Oswald to leave. We are to believe that Baker made out his affidavit with the guy he allegedly just threatened with a gun by sticking it into this stomach. Yet, he never recognized Oswald and Oswald never recognized him. Not even to the point that Baker leaned over to ask him what his name was. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 194) Shenon may not be aware that Baker changed his story. But Allen Dulles and David Belin certainly were aware of it. Because they took his questioning off the record no less than five times. (ibid) A fact that, along with many others, Shenon somehow missed.

    Shenon quite naturally goes all the way in with the incredibly controversial eyewitness Howard Brennan. Brennan is the Dealey Plaza witness who the Commission relied upon for their identification of Oswald in the sixth floor window.(Shenon, pgs. 248-49) Shenon picks up Brennan from about 46 years of discreditation, dusts him off, and presents him to the reader like he is brand new and there is no problem with him. In reality, very few witnesses presented as many problems for the Commission as Brennan did. There was even a vocal contingent on the Commission itself who actually did not want to use him because they foresaw the numerous problems he would eventually create. (Epstein, pgs. 143-44) Among these were his questionable eyesight, his description as to height and weight of a man who had to have been kneeling down, the question of how his description got to the authorities, and the fact that Brennan had failed to identify Oswald at a subsequent lineup. Shenon has a novel excuse for the last. Quoting David Belin, he says well, Kitty Genovese died that month with over 30 witnesses hearing her scream, so, via Belin, this is how we are supposed to excuse Brennan’s failure since he feared a communist conspiracy. (I’m not kidding, you can read that on p. 249 of Shenon’s book.)

    Although Shenon has no problem conveying that piece of silliness, what he does not say is that, today, due to the fine work of British police inspector Ian Griggs, there is a real question as to whether or not Brennan was ever at any lineup. In his book, No Case to Answer, Griggs performed what is probably the most complete and thorough inquiry into the Dallas Police lineups in the literature. (Griggs, pgs. 77-106) He details each and every lineup, the people who were there, and when each one took place. None of the police records include Brennan’s name. (ibid, pgs. 85-90) None of the Warren Commission records on the subject include his name. (ibid, p. 93) Griggs then tracked down the listed witnesses who were supposed to be at each lineup. No one recalled Brennan being there. (ibid, p. 94) Captain Will Fritz was at each lineup and described them for the Commission. In his testimony he volunteered nothing about Brennan being at any of them. (ibid, p. 93)

    When asked how many people were in each lineup, Brennan said seven, more or less one in each. (WC Vol. 3, p. 147) As Griggs notes, there were only six spots in the lineup platform, and there appear to have never been any more than four people in any lineup. (See CD 1083, and Griggs, pgs. 85-90) When asked if all the other men in the lineup were caucasians, or if there were any blacks in the lineups, Brennan replied with a startling answer. He said he did not remember. (WC, op. cit.) The reader should recall, this was Texas in 1963 when all public facilities are still segregated.

    Because of all these problems, and more, Griggs concludes one of two things happened. Either Brennan was so unreliable that the police dared not show him a lineup. Or, Brennan performed so poorly at a lineup that the record of it was expunged. Whatever the case, for Shenon to trot out Brennan without chronicling any of the above indicates one of two things. Either the man is an incompetent researcher, or if he did know this he is not being honest with the reader.

    Which is similar to what Shenon does with the work of the late Arlen Specter. Clearly, Shenon spent a lot of time with Specter before he died. Apparently, he never once asked anything like the challenging questions Gaeton Fonzi did, which reduced the Philadelphia lawyer to a stuttering state of confusion back in 1966. To show just how slanted his approach is, consider the following. Shenon admires Specter for wanting to be in on the questioning of Jackie Kennedy, and criticizes Earl Warren for not having Specter there. But yet, Shenon then gives Specter a pass on not having him present FBI agents Jim Sibert and Frank O’Neill or Dr. George Burkley before the Commission. Since all three men were in the autopsy room that night, and Burkley was the one doctor who was both inside the Parkland emergency room and at Bethesda, most objective observers would have to say that the latter three witnesses would have more forensic value to the case than Mrs. Kennedy. Especially in light of the fact that the Commission ignored the value of both her testimony and Secret Service agent Clint Hill’s. Namely that she was stretching out on the back of the limousine to capture a piece of skull that had ejected from President Kennedy’s head. And Clint Hill said he saw a hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull as he ran up to the limousine. Therefore, if the skull debris went backwards, and the hole was in the rear of Kennedy’s skull, Kennedy was likely hit from the front. The veteran reporter somehow misses that clear implication. (Shenon, p. 259)

    It is interesting to observe how Shenon introduces the autopsy. He says the autopsy report was “full of gaps”. This is how he describes what many forensic experts, even Dr. Michael Baden of the HSCA, call probably the worst autopsy in recorded history. In his rush to provide another pass to the Commission, he then writes, “The doctors did not have time to trace the path of the bullets through the president’s body.” (emphasis added)

    This is nonsense of two counts. First, according to the official story there was only one bullet that went through Kennedy’s body. The other went through his skull. Second, anyone who has read the testimony of Dr. Pierre Finck at the Clay Shaw trial knows why the doctors did not dissect the back wound: Because they were told not to by the military brass in the room. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 116) He then says that Sibert and O’Neill were wrong when they said that back wound did not penetrate through the body. (Shenon, p. 260) He doesn’t acknowledge that with the refusal of the military to allow the back wound to be tracked, there is plenty of evidence today that says the agents were correct about the non-transiting back wound. Including the fact that Kennedy’s personal physician, Burkley, certified the back wound as too low to exit the throat. (DiEugenio, p. 121) Further, Shenon provides no reason at all as to why the president’s brain was not sectioned. And Shenon somehow missed the Commission record which states that Specter lied to Rankin by saying that Sibert made no contemporaneous noted of the autopsy. (ibid)

    But Shenon is not done carrying water for Specter. Later on he says that when Specter did his reconstruction of the Single Bullet Theory he wound up with a clear image of the trajectory going through Kennedy’s neck before entering Connally. (Shenon, p. 352) First of all, the bullet did not go through Kennedy’s neck. This is a misrepresentation that Shenon makes throughout the book. And he does it with a rigor that cannot be accidental. The bullet entered his back. And since Specter saw at least one autopsy photo of this, he had to know that. Which is why his so-called reconstruction was a mess. And the reconstruction photo printed in the New York Times, showing a chalk mark in an FBI agent’s back, where Specter marked it, gives the lie to Shenon’s “clear image”. Pat Speer has done a fine analysis of Specter’s faulty reconstruction, showing Specter’s increasing desperation to make it work somehow. Unfortunately for the Commission counsel, he could not. But you would never know that from reading Shenon’s book.

    VI

    But as bad as Shenon is in the handling of the physical evidence, he is even worse in his discussions of both Oswald in New Orleans and Mexico City. Clearly, when Jim Garrison’s investigation was disclosed to the public in 1967, the Commission was left with egg on its face. How could the 1964 inquiry have missed so much evidence of Oswald being involved with anti-Castro Cubans and CIA agents? Wouldn’t that be very suspicious behavior which should have raised some serious questions about who Oswald was, and what he was doing in the summer and fall of 1963? Was it withheld from the Commission by the FBI, or the CIA? As it turns out, both John Newman and Anthony Summers found out the FBI did withhold information about Banister and 544 Camp Street from the Commission. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p.102)

    The way Shenon finesses this point is consistent with his overall design. He goes the 1964 time capsule route of freezing everything at that time. He never mentions Guy Banister. And if you do that, then you don’t have to delve into the whole issue of how Oswald ended up with Banister’s address on at least one of his pro-Castro flyers that summer in New Orleans. Which, of course, would lead to this question: Why would a seemingly pro-Castro advocate like Oswald stamp a rightwing CIA agent’s address on his literature? As we shall see, Shenon did not want to go in that direction. It would have ruined the whole insidious plan of his book.

    So Shenon goes the New York Times route. He smears Garrison by calling his prosecution a blatant miscarriage of justice. He then mentions very select witnesses like Carlos Bringuier, Dean Andrews and Evaristo Rodriguez. He treats that trio in a very deliberate and limited way. For instance, he says that the FBI could not find the mysterious caller, Clay Bertrand, who wanted Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald. (Shenon, p. 412) Shenon is, once again, avoiding the declassified record created by the ARRB. For when a Justice Department source revealed in 1967 that Bertrand and Clay Shaw were the same person, FBI officer Cartha DeLoach wrote to fellow officer Clyde Tolson that Shaw’s name had surfaced in December of 1963 as part of the original FBI inquiry into the Kennedy case. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 388) Later on, it turned out that the FBI did have several sources who revealed to them that Shaw was Bertrand. And Jim Garrison had several more. Further, Andrews admitted to Harold Weisberg that Shaw was Bertrand. (ibid, pgs. 387-88) In typical MSM spin mode, Shenon uses Andrews’ altered description of Bertrand to demean his value as a witness. He can do this since he does not reveal that Andrews’ office was rifled and his life was threatened. (ibid)

    Oswald in New Orleans is a good place to bring up Shenon’s portrait of Allen Dulles. Shenon tries to portray the fired spymaster as a doddering old blunderbuss throughout. Thereby ignoring the key fact that no Commissioner was as active in the proceedings as much as Dulles was. (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 274) Although Shenon tries to hold Bobby Kennedy responsible for the Commission not knowing about the CIA plots to kill Castro, isn’t the much more logical culprit Allen Dulles? The plots began under his watch, and continued under his supervision for over two years. Dulles attended each executive session meeting of the Commission, and more full and partial hearings than anyone else. He had more than ample opportunity to inform the fellow Commissioners about the plots. He chose not to.

    In his discussion of Oswald and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Shenon quotes Dulles as saying that no one would hire someone as shiftless as Oswald as an undercover agent. (p. 145) He then quotes him as saying, “What was the ostensible mission? Was it to penetrate the Fair Play for Cuba Committee?” Shenon can’t bring himself to answer Dulles with, yes, that is what many people researching the JFK case now believe. If not, then why would Oswald stamp his FPCC literature with the address of 544 Camp Street, which was Guy Banister’s office? And why would the FBI block information about this from going to the Commission? Why would so many witnesses see Oswald inside Banister’s offices? Why, according to some of them, would Banister give Oswald his own room to work out of? Why would Banister exclaim about Oswald using his address on his FPCC flyers, “How is it going to look for him to have the same address as me?” (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 111-13) And then, is it just a coincidence that both the FBI and CIA had counter-intelligence programs in operation against the FPCC at the time Oswald was creating such a ruckus in New Orleans? And is it just another coincidence that one of the men running the CIA program in this regard was David Phillips, who was then seen with Oswald before he allegedly went to Mexico? And is it just a coincidence that on September 16th, the day Oswald stood in line at the New Orleans Mexican consulate with CIA agent William Gaudet, the CIA sent the FBI a cable saying that they were going to plant “deceptive information which might embarrass” the FPCC in a foreign country. (ibid, p. 356)

    Shenon’s readers cannot ask if this is all just a coincidence. For the simple reason that he gives them almost none of this information. Therefore, he can leave the Dulles’ supposition hanging out there as the mental meanderings of a tired old man.

    But there is another reason that the author does all this. Shenon is about to end his book with a very much planned for coup de grace. And in doing so, he is about to unleash another Shenonism. That is, he will present something that is old as new, and convey it to the reader as something important which the Commission should have known about.

    Because of his sources, Shenon is intent on keeping Oswald as the sole killer of Kennedy. But he wants to solve a problem the Commission had trouble with. Namely, supplying Oswald with a credible motive. Shenon’s solution is one of the biggest CIA backstops in the history of this case. Shenon says that Castro was behind Oswald. In fact, as HSCA investigators Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez discovered, many of the false stories that surfaced in the days after the assassination linking Oswald to Castro originated with assets of none other than David Phillips. Who was very likely the overall supervisor for Oswald’s activities in New Orleans with the FPCC. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 362) But by not exposing what Oswald was really up to in New Orleans, he greases the rails for what he is about to do in Mexico City.

    And what he does there is pure sorcery. It is evident from his rather sparse footnotes that the he has read the HSCA’s Mexico City Report, commonly known as the Lopez Report. What is amazing is: 1.) How little he uses it, and 2.) How he bypasses its meaning. Anyone who reads the Lopez Report cannot escape the clear suggestion that Oswald did not go to Mexico City. And if that is so, then someone impersonated him at the Cuban and Russian embassies. Because the Lopez Report does not deal with Oswald’s alleged bus trip to Mexico City or his return to Texas, the longest and most detailed study of those two bus voyages is in John Armstrong’s Harvey and Lee. (See pages 614-706) This author wrote a shorter treatment of the subject in which he agreed with Armstrong’s thesis. (Follow the link and scroll down.) As we shall see, Shenon cannot agree with this imposter concept. And he dares not list the following evidence which indicates that is the case:

    • The voice on the tapes sent from the CIA’s Mexico City station to the FBI turned out not to be Oswald’s.
    • In over 50 years the CIA has not been able to produce a photo showing Oswald going either into or out of one of the two embassies. Even though they had extensive multi-camera coverage of each building and Oswald visited both embassies a total of five times.
    • Numerous witnesses who saw “Oswald” said he was a short man with blonde hair.
    • In 1978, photos showing this man were released by the Cuban government. They matched the short, blonde witness testimony stated above.
    • The man the CIA says went to the embassies spoke broken Russian and fluent Spanish. This is the opposite of what we know about Oswald. He spoke fluent Russian and poor Spanish.
    • Before she signed her deal with the phony Tex-Italia films, Marina Oswald insisted that Oswald had never mentioned going to Mexico City to her before she left New Orleans.
    • The FBI canvassed every photo shop within a five-mile radius of the Cuban and Russian embassies. None of them recalled Oswald coming in to get a photo, which is what had to have occurred.

    The list could go on and on, e.g. Oswald’s name is not on the bus manifest going down and the FBI could never find the attendant who sold him a ticket. The point is this: Shenon does not deal with any of the above matters. Why? Because of his upcoming Shenonism. Which we will now elucidate.

    Based on an FBI report of an informant codenamed SOLO, Shenon is going to write that Oswald walked into the Cuban consulate and said that he was going to kill Kennedy. Now, when Shenon appeared on Face the Nation with his old friend Bob Schieffer, Schieffer was shocked about this “new” document and Shenon said, well it had been sitting there in the National Archives all this time. That implication is simply false. I saw this document 19 years ago in San Francisco at Dr. Gary Aguilar’s house. John Newman and myself were visiting Gary and I was looking through some documents the former intelligence analyst had in his briefcase. When I picked this one up and showed it to John he said quite simply and directly, “That’s a forgery.”

    And upon analysis, that is pretty much an inescapable conclusion. The document consists of a letter by an informant to Gus Hall, head of the communist party in America. Much of the material in the report is accurate, since SOLO was an informant within the CPUSA. But as Newman told me in a phone conversation, one of the problems with the document is this: He would not include that kind of information in a letter to Hall. (Interview with Newman, 11/29/13) He was much too experienced and much too aware of proper channels to do that. Secondly, on the surface this story is specious. We are to think that because Oswald was having difficulty getting his in-transit visa to Russia via Cuba that he would now explode in front of the workers there and say, “I’m going to kill Kennedy!” When, in fact, it was his own fault that he was having problems getting the visa since he was not prepared with the correct documentation. For instance, he didn’t even have the proper passport photo.

    Related to this, as Arnaldo M. Fernandez wrote in his CTKA review of Castro’s Secrets, how could Oswald or an imposter say such a thing without either the incoming or outgoing consul hearing it i.e. Eusebio Azcue or Alfredo Mirabal? Because both men testified to the HSCA they heard no such thing. Neither did the person who dealt with Oswald the most, receptionist Silvia Duran.

    Further, if one looks at the table of Oswald’s alleged activities in Mexico City in Oswald and the CIA, one will see that Oswald or his impersonator called the Russian Embassy before visiting the Cuban embassy. (Newman, p. 356) He then visited the Cuban Embassy in person. Why on earth would he say something like this knowing that he needed clearance from both embassies to get his in-transit visa to Russia? Once he had the difficulties at the Cuban embassy, they would just call the Russians and tell them, “Hey, this guy said he’s going to kill Kennedy.” (ibid, interview with Newman.)

    As Newman also stated, Castro did not make any mention of this in either speech he made concerning the JFK assassination afterwards. That is the nationally televised radio/TV appearance of November 23rd, or his speech at the University of Havana on November 27th. And since no one heard Oswald say this in the embassy, Castro would have had to manufacture the quote. Why would he do such a thing?

    Newman also said that the informant would not manufacture it either. His thesis is that someone in the FBI manufactured the quote and then stuck it in the report. He compared it to a man stealing someone else’s check and forging the signature. Newman also said that this is not the last of these documents that the ARRB found pinning the crime on Castro. The rest are classified Top Secret and may be declassified in 2017. The purpose of keeping them classified is so they could not be exposed, yet their contents could be divulged to select people in the higher circles. Who could then parcel them out to journalists who were predisposed to run with them.

    The other way that Shenon propagates his Castro did it story is through a woman named Elena Garro de Paz. Elena was distantly related to Silvia Duran, and, for political reasons-Duran was a leftist, Elena a conservative – they did not like each other. Elena told a story about seeing Oswald at a “twist party” with Duran. Her story at times also included a red-haired Cuban, which recalled one of the Phillips’ originated stories about Oswald via his asset Gilberto Alvarado. A story that fell apart under scrutiny. Elena was a fairly popular conservative writer in Mexico at the time. Many considered her eccentric and, as Shenon admits, CIA station chief Winston Scott thought she was “nuts”. Duran never denied the “twist party” or the possibility that Elena was there. But she always denied that the man she met as Oswald was there.

    When I asked Eddie Lopez about the Elena allegations back in 1994, he said that he probably spent too much time tracking them down. When I recently talked to Dan Hardway about them, he went further in his remarks: he wished at that time he had the document saying the CIA was about to try and discredit the FPCC in a foreign country. (E-mail communication with Hardway, 11/19/13) Meaning he felt it was part of a deliberate disinformation campaign. The fact that CIA FPCC informant June Cobb, appears to be the first to disseminate the allegations would appear to support that view.

    Whatever one thinks of Elena Garro de Paz and her stories, what Shenon does with them is diabolical. By coupling this questionable witness with the specious SOLO report, he postulates a conspiracy by Cuba to kill Kennedy through Oswald. And he tops it off by using Elena to implicate Silvia Duran in the plot! The way Shenon does this is clever, and in keeping with his method of keeping the reader in the dark. The reader will note, I previously wrote that Duran always denied “that the man she met as Oswald” was at the twist party. The reason I stated it that way was because Duran always denied that Oswald was the man who she talked to in the embassy. She has always been one of the strongest witnesses bolstering the concept of an imposter in Mexico City: the short, blonde Oswald. As noted above, Shenon does not tell the reader about any of this, even though it echoes throughout the Lopez Report. So when he confronts Duran late in the book and she tells him she was not attracted to the short guy, Shenon interjects that Oswald was 5′ 9″ inches tall. Therefore implying that Duran was not being honest. (Shenon, p. 552) He can get away with this because he does not tell the reader that Duran never saw the Oswald he is describing. He does the same with witness Oscar Contreras. He says that in 2013, Contreras said that he saw Oswald talking to people from the Cuban embassy at a banquet. It is bad enough that this story just came out decades later. But what makes it worse is that when interviewed by other writers like Tony Summers, Contreras also said the man who identified himself as Oswald to him was a short blonde guy. (Summers, Conspiracy, p. 352)

    So what Shenon does here is turn the Lopez Report on its head. Instead of the intricate delineation of a CIA deception in advance of the assassination to implicate Oswald by use of an imposter, Shenon tells us Duran was part of a Cuban plot to recruit the real Oswald. But further, Shenon does not tell the reader that when Duran was arrested the day after the assassination, her description of a short blonde Oswald was edited out of transcripts given to the Warren Commission. (Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 646) In fact, Phillips actually prepared the list of questions for the Mexican security forces (DFS) to ask Duran. And they were clearly implicative of ensnaring her in a phony Castro plot against Kennedy. (ibid, p. 647) Years later, Duran told Ed Lopez that she had been tortured in order to get her to admit that she, Oswald and the Cuban government were part of a plot to murder President Kennedy. In fact, they actually tried to stuff words to that effect into her mouth under painful duress.(ibid, pgs. 676-67) According to a Flash Cable sent to CIA headquarters, the idea for her second arrest was to try and get her to corroborate the Gilberto Alvarado story about Oswald being paid in advance by a “negro with red hair in the Cuban embassy” to kill Kennedy. Alvarado was also told to say that he saw Duran hugging Oswald in the embassy. Elements of Alvarado’s story will later get mixed in with Elena Garro’s. In fact, like Elena’s story, Phillips’ questions tried to establish a relationship between Duran and Oswald outside the embassy compound. (ibid, p. 675) As the reader can see, Shenon is continuing in Phillips’ footsteps. Except he covers his trail by cutting out the information that will reveal those steps.

    Towards the very end, Shenon does something even worse than that. He tries to aggrandize the Garro de Paz twist party with Oswald into something like the Murchison ranch party in Dallas the night before JFK’s assassination. (Shenon, p. 556)According to Shenon, the whole purpose of the occasion was to put Oswald up to killing Kennedy! Recall, according to Duran and Contreras, its not even Oswald at the party. With Elena Garro there! This I what I mean about the book scaling the walls of high camp.

    This review could go on and on. For perhaps twice as many pages. That is how many dubious facts and comments it contains. As Victor Marchetti told me, the joke about David Phillips and the CIA was that he never really retired. As he told me, “Dave was retired, but not really retired.” This was when Phillips met Marchetti to try and get him to join his CIA alumni association of former officers. Well, from this horrendous book, the joke is that it looks like Shenon never really retired from the New York Times. He is still hard at work on their national security agenda. Recall what Judy Miller did in the run up to the Iraq War? Shenon just did the same for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. He put out a cover story; one that is patently false.

    The cruel and shocking act the Warren Commission performed is that it helped frame an innocent man for killing President Kennedy. The surviving members of that infamous panel have been trying to wash themselves clean of what they did for over 40 years. Shenon was their latest volunteer. If one wants to read the real story behind what happened inside the Warren Commission, please read Inquest or Breach of Trust. One will find more truth in one chapter of either book than you will find in all of A Cruel and Shocking Act.

    Read the analysis by Arnaldo M. Fernandez for more on Shenon’s use of this improbable “threat” by Oswald.